Everything and Nothing: The Life and Development Work of Bill Armstrong

The slogan “not about us without us” has its origins in fourteenth-century Poland and the Latin abbreviation Nihil novi, but it also has a contemporary resonance in participatory development and the anti-“woke” critiques of social justice issues from conservative politicians and commentators alike, to diminish these social movements and their approaches. Reviewing a personal biography in a development journal may not seem a natural fit. But Peter Britton’s telling of the story of Bill Armstrong and his passionate belief in “‘not about us without us” is a central part of his personal philosophy, a phrase, which, paradoxically, does not appear in the book. It certainly comes through, though, as well as it being about good development practice. My interest in this story is in the 1960s and 1970s when Bill played a major role in two institutions that grounded a lot of development practice and participatory development philosophy: Action for World Development (AWD) and Australian Volunteers Abroad (AVA). Both, in their own way, challenged the paternalist and colonial views of global development at the time. This was a period of intense critique of colonialism and global development: including Franz Fanon (1965), among many others. In terms of development practice, Arnstein (1969), in her highly critical assessment of urban planning for African American communities in Chicago, and the work of Freire (1970), and Illich (1971), on radical approaches to adult education, were major sources of inspiration at the time, and for Bill, it was also the work of Cardijn (1965/2018) and the Christian Worker movement. All of these writings pointed to a different way of seeing the Global South and ways of engaging together. I joined AWD as a student and met Bill briefly in 1974 when he was national coordinator, an event which he may not remember. It was an inspiring period in which people genuinely believed that it was through collective action that global injustices could be addressed. As a global movement, AWD built political pressure in favour of more just global structures such as the New International Economic Order, fair trade, just decolonisation, and the nascent sustainable development movement. Bill then went on to lead the AVA program for twenty years and built it more as a solidarity program than a paternalistic technical support program, which many volunteer programs still tend to be. He was on the executive of ACFID, also for twenty years, and president for a period, an era covered in my 2015 book NGOs and Political Change. In that period, he was very active in the East Timor freedom movement and, later on, in Australian First Nations advocacy. Peter Britton has woven a very personal story about someone who was a committed, passionate, and an unassuming leader who saw a sabbatical as six months working on an assembly line in a car factory. The title of the book Everything and Nothing suggests the idea that change comes largely unseen from the backrooms as much as in the streets. The book is also very much about an era of social change and social justice in which Bill was never very far from the action.