Tony Abbott in the 1970s. Credit:ACP Library Entering the SRC complex from the rear, Mr Woof, then 25, stumbled into a melee. Speaking for the first time publicly about the encounter, he recalls taking up a ''protective'' position across an inner doorway . Almost immediately, he maintains, an agitated Mr Abbott came up without warning and took a swing at him. ''I don't think he meant to connect,'' Mr Woof says. ''It was more like when a person … keeps their elbow quite bent and brings the fist sort of across the face.'' Nevertheless, he adds, ''I had to duck.'' Mr Woof was sufficiently aggrieved days later to go to the Glebe courthouse and lay a previously unreported civil claim for assault against Mr Abbott. ''I didn't think the bastard should get away with it,'' Mr Woof says. ''He wasn't a liked person … it wasn't his politics, it was the way he implemented his politics.''

Illustration: Ron Tandberg. When the case came on, Mr Woof showed up alone to represent himself. Across the room was the young Mr Abbott, accompanied by half a dozen middle-aged men in suits whom Mr Woof took to be his opponent's legal team. ''Perhaps he could have got his friends to wear wigs and gowns, but they were dressed like practising barristers and solicitors,'' he recalls. After giving evidence to the magistrate and being asked to call witnesses, Mr Woof decided his cause was doomed in the face of this firepower, and withdrew. ''One way or another I could see I would be outmanoeuvred,'' he said. He left Sydney the following year to join the anti-whaling organisation Sea Shepherd, and these days lives as a secondary school principal in China.

Memories of his encounter with Mr Abbott have been stirred by the resurfacing of accounts of the fracas and events leading up to it. One leaflet, headed ''President's report: Left clings to power'', is apparently written and signed off by Mr Abbott. ''Unfortunately one Peter Woof, claiming to have business with Honi [Honi Soit, the student paper] in fact proved interested only in opening the door to his confreres outside. I had to restrain him from doing so,'' Mr Abbott wrote. ''I also had to restrain [then SRC electoral officer] David Patch from closing the front office in my face.'' Mr Woof and Mr Patch remember matters very differently. Mr Woof says he had gone to the SRC offices alone, and was neither trying nor able to let others in when Mr Abbott swung at him. Mr Patch says he was on opposite sides of a door from Mr Abbott but was trying to protect frightened female staff who had closed it because Mr Abbott was being ''loud and scary''. ''He just kicked the door in,'' Mr Patch alleges. Mr Patch, later an unsuccessful Labor candidate in Wentworth and now a state prosecutor, stressed that no one was hurt in the incident.

The year before Mr Abbott had unsuccessfully run for student president. The winning candidate, Barbara Ramjan, alleged that he came to within a couple of centimetres of her nose and punched the wall on either side of her head. He later denied her account. A spokesman for Mr Abbott declined to comment on the fresh allegations. ''These matters have been dealt with,'' he said.