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The Sydney Push was a predominantly left-wing intellectual sub-culture in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early '70s. Famous members of "The Push" include Wendy Bacon, Eva Cox, Liz Fell, Germaine Greer, Harry Hooton, Robert Hughes, Frank Moorhouse, Lillian Roxon, Sasha Soldatow, Jim Staples.
The Push operated in a pub culture and were noted libertarians and nonconformists, critical of authority.
Some of the key intellectual figures in Push debates included D.J. Ivison, George Molnar, Roelof Smilde, Darcy Waters and A.J. Baker, according to the article, Sydney Libertarians and the Push, published in Broadsheet in 1975. Other active people included June Wilson, Les Hiatt, Ian Bedford, Terry McMullen, Ken Maddock and Alan Olding, among many others listed in the article.
John Anderson, a Scottish born professor of Philosophy at Sydney University in the 1940s, was an important figure in the formation of the Push and Sydney Libertarianism, and in their ongoing pursuit of intellectual discussion and debate.
Sydney Libertarianism adopted an attitude of permanent protest based on the sociological theories of Max Nomad, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels, which predicted the inevitability of elites and the futility of revolutions. They used phrases such as "anarchism without ends," "pessimistic anarchism," and "permanent protest" to describe their activities and theories. Others labeled them as the 'Futilitarians'. An early Marx quotation, used by Wilhelm Reich as the motto for his The Sexual Revolution, was adopted as a motto vis:
"Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be."
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