Alan Knight (4ZZZ): There were two things that influenced us. We were culturally influenced by the whole rock music explosion; the Beatles and things like that. But we were also to an extent influenced by the hippies. So you had this mixture of rock music, psychedelic drugs and ultra-leftist politics, which led to a lot of very strange demonstrations.
By 1966, however, the initial spark of the post-Beatles boom had faded. The biggest new band in Brisbane was Bay City Union, led by Matt Taylor, later the leader of Chain (Bay City Union also featured latter-day Master’s Apprentices bass player and prominent manager Glenn Wheatley). But with only one single to their credit, Bay City Union’s résumé was even thinner than that of the Purple Hearts. The band split in 1968.
Brisbane was dull. The city simply shut down on weekends. The saying used to go that on Sundays you could have fired a cannon down Queen Street in the city centre and not hit anyone or anything. For young people, the prevailing atmosphere was a fetid, fermenting mixture of enervating heat, boredom and unrelieved tension.
Two noted radicals, Mitch Thompson and Brian Laver, found a novel way of releasing the pressure, staging multimedia extravaganzas at the old Communist Party headquarters at Brisbane Trades Hall, near Central Station. These Sunday-evening speakeasies were named Foco, a Cuban–Spanish word meaning guerrilla encampment.
Brian Laver: We wanted to politicise people, we weren’t just about providing entertainment. But the formula worked, I think, because there was nothing to do on a Sunday night, it was boring as shit, and so people mobilised in their hundreds. I don’t think there would have been a time where we had less than 500 people.
The shows were a melange of live music, theatre, film, food, poetry and debate spread among the venue’s rooms, with bands sharing the main hall with theatre group Tribe, featuring a young Geoffrey Rush. But as Foco grew – to the point of regularly attracting turn-away crowds – it inevitably became a political target. When an MP claimed it was a distribution centre for illegal drugs, the end was near.
John Stanwell (4ZZZ): It became a real threat, because good middle-class kids were going to see it. So the [authorities] basically smashed it. They set it up with a drug scare on a night where we had brought up a band from Melbourne, the Wild Cherries, which was our biggest financial exposure, and it bankrupted it.
The Wild Cherries had formed in 1964 as a jazz combo, but they had been transformed into a relentless psychedelic outfit by the arrival of former Purple Hearts guitarist Lobby Loyde in 1967. Soon after, Loyde joined the Aztecs, fronted by another Brisbane expatriate, Billy Thorpe, with whom he explored a harder blues-based sound.
During the same period two of the remaining Purple Hearts returned to Brisbane, forming a new band, the Coloured Balls. The band gigged around the city until 1969 without committing anything to vinyl. It wasn’t until February 1972 that Loyde, who had remained in Melbourne, took the name for a new version of the group, releasing the cult classic Ball Power the following year. But by then the bottom had long since fallen out of the beginnings of an original music scene in Brisbane.
Ed Kuepper: There wasn’t anything happening musically to speak of. It was an incredibly dead scene. It seemed unbearable to me at the time. Bands that were working were doing covers of Deep Purple, which I found pathetic. I had nothing but total contempt for that area of musical existence. There was just nothing.
If inspiration were to be found, it would have to come from elsewhere.
Frank Nicklin retired from politics in January 1968. His long-serving deputy, Jack Pizzey, was elected unopposed as Country Party leader and premier. The deputy leadership was contested by three men: Ron Camm, the Minister for Main Roads; Lands Minister Alan Fletcher; and the Minister for Works and Housing, 57-year-old Johannes Bjelke-Petersen.
Although little known in the wider electorate and not highly regarded either inside or outside his own party, Bjelke-Petersen was a shrewd numbers man, and he won the job, along with the additional portfolios of Aboriginal affairs and police. When Jack Pizzey dropped dead of a heart attack six months later, Bjelke-Petersen, against all expectations, was elected unopposed as premier.
Born in 1911 in New Zealand to Danish immigrants, Joh Bjelke-Petersen had a difficult early life. His family moved to Queensland three years after his birth, settling on a farm (later named Bethany) outside Kingaroy, near the Bunya Mountains north-west of Brisbane. With his father frail and his family extremely poor, farm duties were left largely to Joh.
His older brother, Christian, was studious and sensitive, with no taste for the backbreaking labour of farm work. He later died at the age of 22. Joh maintained that the stomach ulcers that cut Christian down were brought on by too much study, a telling assessment.7 Joh was a doer, not a thinker, with no time for abstract philosophy or cultural pursuits, unless it involved spreading the good news of his strict Lutheran faith.
A bout of childhood polio briefly slowed Joh down, leaving him with one leg half an inch shorter than the other. But he was made of sterner stuff than his brother, and at 13 he left school to work the farm full-time, dreaming of lifting his family from poverty. He was convinced that his faith and, above all, hard work would reward him.
I was filled with a tremendous desire and a tremendous determination to work and to strive and to overcome the problems that confronted my parents and I was encouraged by my mother who worked long hours . . . We had extreme poverty but I was rich in that my parents gave me a deep understanding of spiritual things by their lives and their influence.8
This Calvinist outlook of ‘hard work = money = success = salvation’ accounts for Bjelke-Petersen’s fanatical pursuit of state development while premier.9 Whether it was the drilling of oil on the Great Barrier Reef or the tearing down of historic buildings, Bjelke-Petersen was not about to let arcane concerns about conservation and heritage get in the way of the more important business of wealth creation.
It also explains his passionate pursuit of unfettered free enterprise and his hatred of anything that smacked of socialism. After entering parliament in 1947 as the member for Nanango, Bjelke-Petersen’s maiden speech – indeed, almost all his speeches – stressed the freedom to develop without any kind of regulation from the state. Instead he attacked the evils of drinking, gambling (including the broadcasting of horse-racing), imported films and working on the Sabbath.
After becoming premier, Bjelke-Petersen retained the police portfolio, vowing to make law and order his own personal crusade. He was less concerned about the allegations of official corruption swirling around the force. A tightly controlled Royal Commission held over the summer of 1963–64 had turned up nothing, but then, the government was in the force’s pocket. Journalist Evan Whitton characterises the relationship in these terms: ‘you stand for law and order; we are your loyal spear-carriers in this unending battle; an attack on the force, or individuals therein, is an attack on you and your policies’.10 This mutual agreement would ultimately benefit both parties.
Bjelke-Petersen had been a vocal critic of the gerrymander during his time on the opposition benches. Once in power, he became its staunchest defender, further manipulating the system to his advantage. ‘We believe,’ he said in a statement thick with unintended irony, ‘in the rights of the minority as well as the rights of the majority.’11
A more humorous but revealing comment on Bjelke-Petersen’s attitude to democracy came from a National Party conference in July 1977. Rebuking the prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, for criticising the South African apartheid regime, Bjelke-Petersen offered the following: ‘We have got to get away from talking about majority rule – it just doesn’t add up.’12
The real genesis of this story lies not in the foundations set down by any band, but in the unlikely shape of a sporting tour by the South African rugby union team in the winter of 1971.
The Springbok tour came amid a rising tide of condemnation of South Africa’s apartheid laws, and
their arrival in Australia was met with fierce demonstrations, which rolled continuously as the team and their entourage were hounded from state to state. Matches in Melbourne and Sydney were interrupted as protesters invaded the pitch. Hundreds more in the stands blew whistles similar to those used by the referees, turning the games into high farce.
Bjelke-Petersen was at the low ebb of his early premiership. The previous October, he had survived a challenge from within his own ranks by a solitary vote, his own. He was perceived, even within his own party, as a wowser and a country bumpkin. Further, both he and his ministers were under pressure over conflict of interest allegations in relation to their numerous share portfolios, in particular with mining giant Comalco, and Bjelke-Petersen’s defensive media handling of the issue saw him branded a weak and ineffective leader.
The Springbok tour gave the premier the law-and-order ticket he needed to banish that perception for good. His proclamation of a month-long state of emergency caused immediate uproar: the suspension of civil liberties and the granting of extraordinary (and unspecified) police powers on the pretext of protecting a visiting football team from political dissenters was unprecedented. It earned the premier the nickname Jack Boots Bjelke.
The result was predictable. Protests against the tour were further inflamed, and the government itself became the target, with 40 unions declaring an immediate 24-hour strike. With the government preparing to go to two by-elections, Bjelke-Petersen wasted no time in linking the unions (and by extension the ALP) to anarchy in the streets. No one, however, foresaw the level of force with which the protests would be crushed.
The Springboks finally arrived in Brisbane on 22 July. They were greeted outside their lodgings, the Tower Mill Motel, by about 300 demonstrators and an equivalent number of police. The standoff did not prevail long: after just 15 minutes, police charged the crowd, scattering them into Wickham Park below. Many were assaulted. But they were not easily dissuaded.
Alan Knight: What you’ve got to understand with these demos, they didn’t last for an hour or so. They went for days, in the face of this police violence. People just kept coming back. They’d get biffed or roughed up and then they’d come back later on.
Demonstrations began again the following morning, and ended in a stalemate when staff from the Holy Spirit Hospital, next door to the motel, complained to police that noise levels were disturbing patients. A silent vigil ensued and eventually the crowd dispersed peacefully, although some remained through the night. It was the next day – Saturday 24 July, the day of the Springboks’ first match – that was to bring matters to a head.
The premier issued a warning. ‘I would not be surprised if the demonstrators open a new line of attack. I have heard that it could be rough in the streets today.’13
The proclamation of the state of emergency had enabled the government to move the match from the scheduled venue of Ballymore Oval in Herston to the Royal National Association showgrounds in Bowen Hills. Surrounded by high walls and topped with barbed wire, the fortress-like showgrounds were considered the better venue to deter protesters. Thus, instead of targeting the game, between 1500 and 2000 demonstrators assembled in Victoria Park opposite the grounds before marching slowly up to Wickham Terrace, eventually camping themselves once again at the foot of the Tower Mill in the gathering darkness of the late afternoon.
Commensurate with the Saturday crowd, the police ranks had swelled to an intimidating 500, not just uniformed and plain-clothes ranks from the city, but country ‘brownshirts’, bussed in as reinforcements by the police commissioner, Ray Whitrod. Among the crowd were two young law students, future Queensland premier Peter Beattie and barrister and civil libertarian Terry O’Gorman. For both, what transpired that evening proved to be a pivotal event in their lives.
Terry O’Gorman: It was my involvement as a legal observer [of the demonstration] that was my introduction to the whole scene. I remember after the police charge a particular law student who was organising the legal observers came back, thoroughly traumatised by it. Prior to that I’d come from a very Catholic, Christian Brother, right-wing education and family background. So, from that point of view, it was fairly formative.
Wickham Terrace winds along the northern ridge overlooking Brisbane’s central business district, lined by upmarket hotels and medical clinics. Opposite the Tower Mill lies Wickham Park. Fringed by gigantic Moreton Bay fig trees, it slopes steeply down towards Albert Street, which runs directly through the city heart, and the Roma Street markets. At the lower end of the park was a small cliff-face, now a stone wall up to four metres in height. The terrain would put the protesters at an unusual disadvantage.
At five o’clock, Whitrod gave a statement to the crowd: ‘There will be no action from police as a group if you move back to the white line, except that there can be individual police action if necessary and in the event of large police action reasonable notice will be given.’14 This pronouncement did nothing to quell the thickening knot of fear rising in the stomachs of the protesters.
Steve Gray (4ZZZ): Moving through the crowd, you could spot the plain-clothes police. The demonstrators were chanting ‘Paint them black and send them back,’ and this busload of coppers pulls up. And they get off the bus and start chanting back, ‘Paint them red and shoot them dead.’ So, not surprisingly, the tension started to rise on both sides of the street.
At 6.54pm, minutes before footage of the protest would go live around Australia courtesy of ABC news, Whitrod told his men to ‘move to the other side of the road’.15
As commissioner, Whitrod did not enjoy the support of his rank and file. Police Minister Max Hodges had brought in the well-educated South Australian a year earlier after convincing Bjelke-Petersen that he risked being dragged under by the still-circulating rumours of official corruption. Whitrod thus had a brief to reform the force, but his prosecution of some police for malpractice earned him the enduring enmity of not only the powerful police union, but the premier as well.
Whitrod was also regarded as a soft touch on students, preferring conciliation and dialogue to force. Only the previous day the country police he had brought in for the occasion had passed a motion of no confidence in him. Thus the proposed orderly move forward – intended by Whitrod simply to move the demonstrators off the road to the opposite footpath – did not eventuate. The violence of the subsequent charge caught even seasoned protesters by surprise.
John Stanwell: These were the country cops who were brought in, with the old [khaki] uniform. They’d been brought in especially for the football game by this new commissioner who was regarded as a pinko liberal bed-wetter, and basically they broke ranks and went berserk. We were cannon fodder.
The protesters immediately found themselves being forced down the hill into Wickham Park as baton-wielding police wrought their vengeance. More police were waiting in the park. As the panicked mob fled towards them, they sprung from the shadows of the trees, tackling and clobbering anyone within reach. Those that evaded the ambush were forced to scramble or jump down the cliff-face as the police gave chase.
Lindy Morrison (The Go-Betweens): It radicalised everybody . . . What I remember most vividly is the actual fear, of running away from police with batons, and seeing them bashing friends. Whoever stumbled and fell got heavily beaten, and all of us were too scared to stop and help.
Peter Beattie: It’s one of those indelible things imprinted in my mind about oppression, about violence, about excessive power. I ran down to Trades Hall and I remember trying to do the gentlemanly thing by letting some of the women in first, and I got beaten up for my trouble.
That same day, the two by-elections were held. The government won both. One seat, Maryborough, had been a Labor stronghold for 56 years; the other, Merthyr, was situated only a few kilometres away from the violence at Tower Mill.
Bjelke-Petersen’s leadership would not be challenged again for another 16 years.
; CHAPTER TWO
guerrilla radio
The University of Queensland’s home campus of St Lucia is one of the largest and oldest in Australia. It is also among the most traditional. On the sandstone cloisters of the Great Court a collection of historic scenes, philosophers and gargoyles are carved in self-conscious appropriation of the grandeur of its European antecedents. Inside the court, jacaranda trees advertise their presence each October in an explosion of lavender. It used to be said on campus that if you hadn’t started studying by the bloom of the jacarandas, you were destined to fail.
Radiating outwards from the court in all directions is a rash of newer, ruder structures, devoid of character or consideration, mindful only of the need to accommodate an ever-growing number of students, a living metaphor for Brisbane itself: traditional and reserved at heart yet, in its conflation of progress with sophistication, unable to stop itself from trampling into vulgarity. Arguably the worst embodiment of this tendency is the Abel Smith Lecture Theatre: named after the former governor of Queensland, the squat, sunken roundhouse also goes by the unflattering nickname of the Pizza Hut.
By the late 1960s, as the centre of higher learning in a state not known for its commitment to intellectual endeavour, the university was arguably the most politically polarised in Australia. On 26 July 1971, two days after the Springbok police riot, a general university strike was declared, protesting both the ongoing state of emergency and, with particular outrage, the conduct of the police at the Tower Mill.
John Stanwell vividly recalls the impact the incident had on campus. A law student, Stanwell had earned his activist stripes in the early anti-conscription protests and was no stranger to police brutality.
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