Peace

1980s

Donated by Colin Hesse

Museum of Australian Democracy collection

The donor of this badge, Colin Hesse, writes:

This badge belonged to my late grandmother, Mavis Grant. My grandmother, like many of her generation of working-class people, was deeply influenced by growing up in the wake of World War One (she was born in Tempe in 1916), then reaching young adulthood in the midst of the Great Depression. By the time she was twenty-three, Australia was at war again.

Her response, and that of her husband Jim (b. 1911), also from a very poor family, was to join the Communist Party. They were both deeply opposed to war and marched in the anti-nuclear rallies of the 1980s. This badge comes from that period of time.