Things were not getting any better in Brisbane. For a year the city had been readying itself for the Commonwealth Games in September, and the atmosphere was more paranoid than ever. The government had quietly wound back its prohibition of street marches due to the associated enforcement costs; now, conscious of upcoming Aboriginal protests, it enacted special legislation increasing police powers to freshly absurd levels. So vaguely drafted was the bill that for the three weeks surrounding the games it became illegal to be in possession of a ‘prohibited thing’ in ‘notified areas’.5 But what and where such things were to be prohibited remained at the discretion of the police minister Russ Hinze.
It is telling that this difficult period saw Triple Zed at the apex of its influence on Queensland political life. Supported by Joint Efforts and subscriber-boosting radiothons, the station employed 13 full-time paid staff. It had also attracted an extraordinary amount of talent, particularly to its newsroom. Between 1980 and 1983 (by which time most of the original station-hands had moved on and musicians were frantically bailing out of the city) several aspiring journalists and broadcasters – Andy Nehl, Tony Collins, Linda Wallace, Nicola Joseph, Louise Butt and Amanda Collinge – actually made the move from Sydney to further their careers in the Sunshine State.
Andy Nehl: I think I was the first of what became known as the Sydney invasion. The next couple of people that came up were Tony Collins and Nicola Joseph, and I guess part of what prompted quite a few other people to come up was the reputation Triple Zed then had from those of us that had gone back.
Amanda Collinge: Brisbane was a great place to learn to be a practising journalist, because there was so much going on politically . . . We used to have a rigorous early morning editorial meeting, apportioning stories, discussing those stories, and off we’d go with our recording material. It was very diligent; it was a proper newsroom.
Although Triple Zed’s core audience was small, its newsroom was putting the government under some pressure, concentrating on allegations of political and police corruption, giving a timid mainstream media numerous leads along the way. Often, the day would begin with an early morning call to the premier, down on the farm at Kingaroy. Remarkably, Bjelke-Petersen played the game, and his uniquely garbled way of fielding questions – combined with the out-of-context lunacy of hearing him hold forth each morning in between a brace of punk tracks – meant that the precious minutes he would grant the station invariably became the breakfast laugh track.
Linden Woodward: It was quite surreal. It seemed to me he’d been raised to be very polite to women. Other than that, he dealt with everyone pretty much the same way, and it was almost like with each conversation you were starting afresh with him, so he would start out answering your questions, and then it would degenerate into, ‘Oh I know where you work, young lady; I know what kind of organisation you’re in,’ and eventually he’d hang up. Tony Collins loved it when he hung up on me, because then he could play [Blondie’s] Hanging On The Telephone. Because I have blonde hair, he thought that was a particularly amusing joke!
Not everyone appreciated the humour. Most of the station’s staff, particularly journalists, were finding themselves under increasing levels of surveillance. Some suffered the frightening experience of having their homes raided at dawn by the Special Branch. Others were subjected to more subtle means of intimidation.
Amanda Collinge: I was at this Russ Hinze press conference one day, which was an eye-opener in itself, and I was approached by someone who started asking me questions that indicated he knew a hell of a lot about me. He asked me first how I was finding my lodgings at 8 Broadway Street in Red Hill. Then he asked me if my Datsun 180B was giving me a problem. And the third question was how was I managing to survive on whatever it was we were paid at Triple Zed at the time.
On 7 November 1982 the city awoke to find the queer old archway on the hill was gone. There was no warning of the pre-dawn attack on the much-loved ballroom: no permit was ever issued for its destruction, and the building had been listed by the National Trust. The Deen Brothers, a no-questions-asked demolition outfit who had infamously destroyed the Bellevue Hotel in George Street three years earlier, took a little less than an hour to level the site. For some, it was the final straw. John Stanwell and partner Helen Hambling, both of whom had fought so hard for Triple Zed’s establishment in 1975, no longer had the energy to continue.
John Stanwell: Cloudland was a sheer act of political vandalism. It was knocked down to build high-rise apartments, for which they didn’t have approval, and they never got approval because it was under a flight path. So that was the proof positive it was an act of vandalism; it was real dick-on-the-table stuff. It was Joh showing that he didn’t even have to care about what anyone in Brisbane thought, and that was just too much. So we left.
Linden Woodward: It was depressing, because the bastards outwitted us. They snuck up on us in the middle of the night and we didn’t catch them. For me as a journalist, in Brisbane, the big thing was the importance of just witnessing things that were happening and saying, I’m watching you.
By now Triple Zed’s operations were becoming unsustainable. With other music promoters beginning to establish themselves – among them former station staff striking out to make a living on their own – competition rose for the decreasing number of gigs around town. As the number of venues shrank and crowd-pulling international tours declined, the brightest local talent also left. While a few good bands remained, they were mostly divided between hardcore punk (Mystery of Sixes, Public Execution, the Vampire Lovers), the avant-garde (the Pits, Pork, Pictish Blood) and the simply lame. None of them was especially listenable.
Since its launch in 1980 Triple M had established itself as the city’s first commercial FM station, attracting two of Triple Zed’s best presenters, Bill Riner and Mark Bracken. Many of Triple Zed’s more conservative listeners shifted their radio dials accordingly to the right. Further, several talented journalists and broadcasters who established their careers at Triple Zed defected to Triple J: Andy Nehl, Tony Collins, Tony Biggs, Linden Woodward and Amanda Collinge all made the jump.
Amanda Collinge: I became aware of why some people resented Sydney people coming up, because it was so much easier to leave. I do remember feeling that little bit guilty, because Triple Zed had started to go through rough times, and when you’re a part of something like that you do feel committed. To just up and go, I felt like I was abandoning ship a bit.
In early 1983 Collinge had assisted fellow journalist Jon Baird in breaking Triple Zed’s biggest story since Cedar Bay, exposing subhuman conditions in the notorious Boggo Road jail. Months later – with almost all the inmates on an extended hunger strike – Corrective Services Minister Geoff Muntz unwisely declared in a press conference that the prisoners ‘could starve for all I care’.6 The jail was almost immediately torched beyond recognition in response. The government was forced into extensive penal reforms; for its part, Triple Zed won the Public (now Community) Broadcasting Association’s annual Golden Reel Award, and considerable new respect.
Jon Baird: Before Boggo Road, we were always the ratbag left-wing media. Afterwards, we started to get journalists ringing Triple Zed up, saying I’m onto a jail story or a criminal justice story, to see if we had anything to help, because we’d become established as a credible media source in areas like the criminal justice system and police corruption.
It was to be Triple Zed’s last major political strike against the government. Bled dry of funds, it began an inexorable shift from paid to volunteer labour. Unable to adequately replace its outgoing talent, the station – in particular the newsroom – would never be the same force again.
Amanda Collinge: There was a very proud history of good journalism in that newsroom, from people like Marian Wilkinson right through to Lindy Woodward. Sloppy journalism was not tolerated there, and nor was sloppy presenting. And all that went out the window when the wages were lost
, unfortunately. That edge of professionalism disappeared, so it was no longer attractive to people who wanted to be media professionals.
Jon Baird: When you’re relying on volunteers to do jobs, you can’t really blame them if things fuck up. It does make things a hell of a lot harder, and at Triple Zed we were really battling [after that]. Just paying the bills was enough.
In August 1983 a Festival Hall show by Californian punks the Dead Kennedys was again blighted by police harassment. Possibly apocryphal was the story of the person arrested outside the venue for carrying a concealed weapon: a pineapple. Embarrassingly factual was the arrest of the band’s African-American drummer Darren Peligro after the show, allegedly for drinking on the street along with other (white) band members and fans. The police thought him a drunken Aborigine. The band’s singer, Jello Biafra, later wrote that he ‘felt safer walking around on the streets of East Berlin than Brisbane’.7
The same month, veteran political activist Tony Kneipp entered the studios of Triple Zed with the intention of making a recording. He had no band, just a song he wanted to knock out before the upcoming state election in October. Payment was made via some construction work around the station, and recording was completed in dribs and drabs over a fortnight, with Kneipp laying down vocals, rhythm and slide guitar, and a honking saxophone. Former Swell Guy Steven Pritchard filled in on drums, while Ian Graham contributed a scorching lead guitar solo over some very wobbly bass. With each line a chorus of friends chanted the song’s title – Pig City – over and over.
The ad-hoc band, which never played again, called itself the Parameters. Although the resulting single was not released for nearly a year (it took Kneipp a while to come up with the B-side), his song received extensive airplay during the election campaign. Kneipp’s protest didn’t stop the National Party winning the election in its own right for the first time in its history: the Queensland Liberal Party, a dismal minority of metropolitan conservatives, had torn up the coalition agreement with the Nationals two months earlier. The Nationals didn’t need them anyway. The opposition was routed, with the Nationals snaring 41 seats from 39 per cent of the vote, while Labor managed 32 seats from 44.4 per cent. Bjelke-Petersen appeared impregnable.
Pig City was a paranoid masterpiece, a genuine Queensland blues.
If you go downtown, just beware
There’s a demonstration in the square
The boys in blue are everywhere
See the blacks in the park
Hear the doors slam, hear the dogs bark
They’re keeping the city safe after dark
The minister for corruption’s working late
He wants a piece of the action in race eight
No SP here, he’s ringing interstate
The blacks at Aurukun have to go
To keep big business on the go
While Joh gets shares in Comalco!8
Who was the bagman, who was the hit man?
Who were the front men, who were the big men?
In the National scam
Hello, hello, is that you dear?
What’s that clicking noise I hear?
Walls have eyes and phones have ears
Go to a dance to have some fun
Here come the boys with their dogs and guns
They don’t like punks – run, Johnny, run!
Who’s that knocking at the door?
At 6am it must be the law!
‘Right, you know what we’re looking for’
State of emergency for the ’Boks
And then to show the workers who’s boss
If you think you’ve got rights, they’re already lost
So you don’t want to know, you’ve heard it before
But if you cop this lot you’ll sure get more
Where to now from ’84?
CHAPTER NINE
brisbane blacks
The most famous Triple Zed gig to be played at Cloudland was also one of the last. Touted as ‘the only band that matters’, the Clash were quick to tap into the local political dialect on their arrival in Australia, and for their set on 20 February 1982 they invited local Aboriginal activist Bob Weatherall to address the crowd. The Commonwealth Games were fast approaching, and the land rights movement was gaining momentum.
Despite the passing of the spectacularly draconian Commonwealth Games Act in March, the opportunity to bring the cause of Indigenous Australia to international attention during the games was compelling. The police force was arguably never more openly politicised than during this time. At one point Russ Hinze (who held the portfolios of police, local government, main roads and racing, earning him the nickname Minister for Everything) even suggested that fans attending the so-called ‘Friendly Games’ might be encouraged to set upon demonstrators themselves, under the approving gaze of his commissioner, Terry Lewis:
I’ll get my police officers to get into the ring first and let it be known to the fans that 2000 or 3000 gangsters are walking down the street . . . I’ll say to my police officers and Terry [Lewis], ‘Let’s stand aside and watch what happens’ . . . Two or three thousand young bucks out of the stand . . . Let them come down and meet the demonstrators in the centre. We’ll stand by and watch fair play.1
With the possible exception of Western Australia, Queensland lagged significantly behind the rest of the country in its relations with its original inhabitants. While the federal government had years earlier dropped its assimilation policy in favour of self-determination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the Queensland government regarded any such moves as a promotion of separatism akin to apartheid. Bjelke-Petersen – who blamed the sorry state of Aboriginal health on the twin evils of alcohol and ‘sin’ – was implacable in his resistance.
Considering the majority of the state cabinet shared a background in the primary industries, and that many held significant mining interests, the government’s hostility towards land rights was unsurprising, although the rhetoric used to attack it was at times naked in its racism. Ken Tomkins, then the minister for Aboriginal and Islander advancement, infamously stated he did not believe Aboriginal people were ‘ready’ for freehold title, concluding hopefully, ‘What I’m saying now mightn’t apply in 50 years’ time. In 50 years evolution, they could be quite a different proposition to what they are today.’2
The irony was that for decades the system of Aboriginal reserves in Queensland effectively did comprise a nation within a nation, closely comparable to apartheid-era South Africa in that they were entirely administered by the white bureaucracy. Just as the cheap labour provided by blacks propped up the white economy in South Africa, so too Aboriginal people on the outstations and reserves in Queensland were expected to work for token wages, a situation that continued long after the Whitlam Government’s passing of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975.
Such persecution, along with strictly controlled freedom of movement and appalling standards of health and housing, resulted in an inevitable drift of Aboriginal people to the cities, where a combination of poor education standards, few employment skills, the effects of displacement and outright racism made survival even more difficult. Unsurprisingly, Aboriginal people were massively over-represented in state custody; by 1980 the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males in Queensland prisons was seven times their proportion to the state’s population. Moreover, the chances of being arrested for trivial offences was exponentially greater: the Courier-Mail once reported that Aboriginal people were 200 times more likely to be arrested for drunkenness in Brisbane than whites.3 Tiga Bayles, who came to the city in 1969 from the township of Theodore in the central Queensland goldfields, was one who received his share of summary justice, Queensland-style.
Tiga Bayles: One of their favourite spots was under the Grey Street [William Jolly] Bridge on the south side. It’d be midnight and you’d be trying
to make your way home from being out, you’d get picked up and taken down there in a paddy wagon or police car and given a bit of a serve. It didn’t matter whether you were drunk or not; the fact that you were black was good enough to qualify you for a ride to the watch-house. My mother was locked up more than once, and she doesn’t drink!
Lindy Morrison, working at the Aboriginal and Islander legal service in the early ’70s, saw more of black life in Brisbane during this time than most whites.
Lindy Morrison: We used to do what we called Pig Patrol at 10 o’clock every night, where we’d go out and try to stop people getting picked up by police, because the police were so vicious to Aboriginal people at that time.
Tiga Bayles left Brisbane in 1976, beginning a long career in radio on Sydney’s 2SER, one of the original dozen community stations which had received its licence from the federal government at the same time as Triple Zed. In early 1982 he began presenting the Aboriginal music program Black Perspectives, while also managing Aboriginal group Us Mob. At the same time he began working with 2SER journalist Louise Butt on an independent documentary, The Whole World’s Watching, aimed at rallying Aboriginal people and white supporters to attend protests against the Commonwealth Games beginning on 30 September.
Butt had conducted several interviews for the documentary at a pre-games land rights conference in Brisbane, then relocated from Sydney shortly afterwards to take up a position at Triple Zed. Her interest in indigenous politics quickly proved influential at the station.
Louise Butt: There was a lot of political unrest within the Aboriginal community and a feeling that they needed to have a focus for expressing their aspirations and discontent. The last big thing had been the tent embassy in Canberra, which had been some time earlier [1972], and then there had been a lot of political work in terms of setting up self-determination organisations. But there was a feeling around at the time, particularly among younger people, that there needed to be some sort of major public event that was a focal point for the Aboriginal community.
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