'Empire Times' students magazine at Flinders University in Adelaide irreverent, racy and radical blast from 1969
The first issue (left) of Adelaide's Flinders University students magazine Empire Times in 1969 and its ongoing radical, irreverent and controversial issues that aimed at usurping authority.
Empire Times (ET) at Adelaide Flinders University was among among Australia’s most radical, irreverent, controversial, creative and forward-thinking student magazines from its start in 1969.
Empire Times began in 1969 out of students dislike of "the format and price of the then student magazine Gita," according to Gita's associate editor/production manager Rod Boswell. Working from the backroom of a Parkside house in Parkside, founder and editor Martin Fabinyi and Boswell decided to buy a printing press "in a fit of pique" for the Empire Times to be the first official student newspaper in Australia to be fully printed and published by students.
Its A&M Multilith 2066 offset press was rumoured to have been used to produce Australia’s first forged decimal currency notes, so Empire Times started in its continuing controversial vein. The luxury of owning and controlling a printing press allowed the student editors to rail against Australia's draconian censorship regime – also an excuse to print risqué and sexist images and content. But the “free love” ethos had to jostled with the early stirrings of Women's Liberation.
Andrew McHugh, editor from 1973 to 1975, described "the overriding ethos of the paper for most of its life (as) irreverence toward all authority; it cocked a snoot and gave the two-fingered or one-fingered salute to all of the powers that it identified (including its own, or the student body's, at various times).” Radicalism at Flinders, only separated from Adelaide University in 1966, was attributed to it being a magnet for students with an artistic bent because of its humanities courses, in particular, drama. In 1974, Flinders was the site of the longest student occupation in Australia.
But Empire Times took its initial inspiration from radical politics and the 1960s counter-culture movements of the United States of America and Europe of the 1960s and ran pieces on the big issues – wars, the environment, feminism, and gay rights. It also devoted space to student-centred concerns such as opposition to university fees, calls to increase student living allowances and demands to overhaul assessment methods.
Prominent Empire Times editors and contributors included Martin Armiger and Greig (H.G. Nelson) Pickhaver, and politicians Steph Key (state) and Kate Ellis (federal). An editor in 1982, Veronika Petroff moved into mainstream media, lectured in journalism and had communication roles in the public sector. Tanya Lyons, editor for the 1992, the Year of the Men’s edition, and became a senior lecturer in the school of international studies at Flinders University.
Empire Times stopped publishing in 2006 as a result of voluntary student unionism but resumed in 2013, produced by the Flinders University Student Association.
