Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  By 23 September hundreds of Aboriginal people from around the country had begun arriving in Brisbane. Three days later, following a march from the Roma Street Forum, a tent city of more than 300 people took root in the traditional Aboriginal meeting place of Musgrave Park in South Brisbane. The ‘city’ began as a cheap solution to the lack of organised accommodation, but over the next three weeks it doubled as the nerve centre of discussion and decision-making.

  The tent city also facilitated an unprecedented degree of contact and collaboration between blacks and whites in Brisbane. A Rock Against Racism gig was staged by Triple Zed on 25 September at Souths rugby league club in West End, and a radiothon was held to raise money to provide food for those camping in the park. But most of the funds were diverted into bailing nearly 320 demonstrators out of jail following two more marches on 4 and 7 October, by which time the games were underway.

  ‘Even though the Deep North is the home of indigenous jazz, blues and soul,’ Clinton Walker writes in his account of Aboriginal country music, Buried Country, ‘in the rest of the sunshine state the country is drier, and the music is country.’ Given the survival of Aboriginal culture is based on its connection to the land and the passing down of oral history, it makes sense that Aboriginal people identified most strongly with country music’s storytelling traditions. (Of course, as Walker also points out, the fact that most Aboriginal people grew up far from the city meant that country music was ubiquitous anyway.4)

  The most potent wellspring of Aboriginal country music in Queensland was Cherbourg, ironically situated just outside Murgon, half an hour north of Bjelke-Petersen’s home base, Kingaroy. Cherbourg had already produced several local heroes, including opera singer Harold Blair, Les Collins and Angus Rabbit. As a raw teenager in the late ’60s, Dennis ‘Mop’ Conlon began his first band, the Magpies, with his uncle Doodie Bond. The Magpies quickly became a popular draw in the black communities of the South Burnett.

  At the age of 14, Conlon moved to Brisbane in search of new opportunities. A new version of the Magpies was soon assembled around the core of Conlon, Bond and Hedley Johnson, playing regular gigs at Aboriginal-run venue the Open Doors on Herschel Street and at the Ship Inn in South Brisbane. By the late ’70s they were even playing occasional punk bills with Razar; as Walker notes, ‘the Task Force didn’t know who to bust first’.5

  With band members constantly drifting back and forth between Brisbane and the towns and communities of the South Burnett, the Magpies was neither a permanent ensemble nor name, and frequently gigs were billed as Dennis Conlon (or Dennis, or Mop) ‘and his band’. One night, after a blazing row with his nephew, Doodie Bond walked out on a gig at the Ship Inn. Spying a poster, he crossed out ‘band’ and substituted ‘Dropouts’ in a fit of pique.6 Bond soon returned and the name stuck, even though not all the members were keen on the tag.

  Dennis Conlon: There were a few of the fellows who took it a bit hard there; they didn’t want to be called the Dropouts. I said, ‘Get a grip on yourself, look at the black community now – we’re not welcome in the mainstream, we are the Dropouts!’

  By early 1982 Conlon was spending most of his time back in Murgon. One night watching television, he saw a current affairs piece about Aboriginal people living and drinking in Musgrave Park.

  Dennis Conlon: It looked good on TV, you know, but the story was just gonna die the next day. I thought, oh well, I’ll write something and give people something to remember it. So I wrote Brisbane Blacks. I had that many pages, it was like a really big story.

  The resulting song – Conlon’s first original composition, set to a slow, lilting melodic refrain – was as plain-spoken and emotionally direct as anything in the Hank Williams canon:

  You look down through your noses to see

  The black man grovelling down at your feet

  With weary eyes looking up at you

  Waiting for the message to get through

  Brisbane Blacks – originally released by Sundown Records under the name of Dennis Conlon and the Magpies, later as Mop and the Dropouts – didn’t quite make it out in time for the Commonwealth Games, although the band did play the aforementioned Rock Against Racism gig. The song’s impact, however, was immediate and far-reaching. The Dropouts were soon in heavy demand nationally.

  Dennis Conlon: We did a lot of fundraisers for black organisations like Born Free in Brisbane, a lot of organisations that were struggling – kindergartens, football clubs, and really we did it because . . . Well, we needed to support them somehow, but really we needed the practice! And what better way to practise than straight on stage? Out of all the years we’ve been together, I can only remember one practice that we’ve ever had at home.

  In 1983 Sydney’s Radio Skid Row received its community broadcasting licence, and immediately offered the Aboriginal community six hours of airtime per week. Tiga Bayles took on the job of programming. The demand for Aboriginal radio in the city was such that six hours quickly became 30, eventually resulting in a satellite station, Radio Redfern.

  Similar calls were being heard in Brisbane. Awareness of Aboriginal issues was at a high after the games protests, and one of Triple Zed’s original aims had been to provide a voice to those inadequately represented by the mainstream media. The movement of former 2SER broadcasters to Triple Zed (including Louise Butt and Amanda Collinge) was also crucial. In mid 1983 Butt approached local community leader Ross Watson about presenting a new show on Triple Zed.

  Charismatic and outspoken, Watson had formed a black protest committee prior to the games, and put together two issues of an independent newspaper, Black Nation. He was also aware of the potential power of black radio: the fact that it was an oral medium, and allowed Aboriginal people the opportunity to speak for themselves, was irresistible.

  Ross Watson: Radio’s a pretty quick medium for communicating to people; it’s effective, it’s oral, it’s much quicker than the printed word, and it was much more appropriate to us culturally.

  Watson began organising a team of people, commencing workshops at the station and identifying Aboriginal music: No Fixed Address and Us Mob’s split soundtrack album Wrong Side Of The Road, and the various artists cassette Rebel Voices, produced by the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA).

  The Murri Hour finally made its debut on Triple Zed (with Brisbane Blacks serving as the obvious theme song) in mid 1984, going to air as a pre-recorded one-hour tape. Announcer Liz Willis, who helped train the new broadcasters, remembers the initial response from the station’s white audience – and from sections within Triple Zed itself – was befuddled, to say the least.

  Liz Willis: The complaint was ‘they talk about football and they play country music’. I mean, that’s standard now, everyone talks about football, but back then no one talked about sport at Triple Zed. And no one played country music, except at a radiothon to make people subscribe so they would take it off!

  Amanda Collinge: It was a real challenge to people, because [although] people said they wanted to be part of this progressive community radio station, when it really happened – when real people from the community got on air – people didn’t like it, because they didn’t sound slick. [And] Aboriginal people have a different way of speaking; they often speak at a different pace; a few had quite thick accents, and we met a fair amount of resistance [because] some people thought it was a real turn-off.

  The Aboriginal community, however, was enraptured.

  Ross Watson: We’d tape the show on Friday and play it on the Saturday morning. Later we’d go somewhere, to a party on a Saturday night, and we’d hear our program just being replayed. People would tape it off the radio and just keep playing it over and over.

  Although the rise of Aboriginal broadcasting in the early ’80s coincided with an upsurge of interest in contemporary Aboriginal music, precious little had yet been committed to tape. Wrong Side Of The Road, released in
late 1981, was one of the few contemporary Aboriginal recordings, if not the first, since Jimmy Little’s heyday. The Warumpi Band’s debut single, Jailanguru Parkarnu, didn’t appear until October 1983; Coloured Stone followed with Black Boy in May 1984.

  The short-term solution to circumvent the lack of music was to invite Aboriginal songwriters into the Triple Zed studios to perform. The most prominent was Kev Carmody. Born in 1946 on the Darling Downs west of Brisbane to an Irish father and Aboriginal mother, Carmody was taken from his parents at the age of 10 and placed in a Christian school on account of his mixed heritage. Emerging from school functionally illiterate, he spent 17 years working as a farm labourer before managing to blag his way into the Darling Downs Institute of Technology in Toowoomba (now the University of Southern Queensland) thanks to his prodigious gifts as a guitarist.

  Kev Carmody: I studied music at night; I did the Australian Music Board exams. I got to a stage where my teacher said you’re miles ahead of the institute out there as far as entry goes, so I went out and I auditioned for it – in my overalls! – and they had to accept me because I was so advanced in theory, but they didn’t have a classical guitar teacher of the standard they required. So they said ‘Look, do this BA in history, philosophy and geography, and take a third of your course in music,’ so that’s how I got in.

  I was lucky; I had great lecturers. For the first tutorial, I said, ‘Can I bring my guitar in?’ I was damn sure within six months I could get this writing thing right, so that was the trade-off – I could put oral history in by using the guitar, it was bloody great, and after about six months I had the skills and just went from there. I didn’t know how to get a book out of a library. I’d never even seen a library!

  Carmody’s ability to improvise solutions in this manner went back to his labouring days.

  Kev Carmody: Through the ’50s we used to have packhorses, and they couldn’t carry a guitar, but there was still music around the campfire every night, you know, mouth organ. But when we got a truck, we could actually carry a guitar, and my uncle knew a few chords. That’s why country music was so important to blackfellas, because you only needed two or three chords and you could put your own words to it. And of course the old uncle, he was very interested in the old African-American stuff like Huddie Ledbetter [Leadbelly]. And the merchant marine mob, after the war the African-American sailors would come over and they used to bring over old jukebox records from America, with the big hole in the middle. You’d get a lump of pipe and put it on the old gramophone that you used to wind up. We used the lump of pipe to fill up the big hole on the jukebox vinyl.

  Unlike Dennis Conlon, Carmody had been composing his own material from early on: steeped equally in rural blues and the urban protest music of Woody Guthrie and early Bob Dylan, his ear for language was as fine-tuned as his guitar playing. Thou Shalt Not Steal – one of four tracks recorded by Watson at Triple Zed and sent to community radio stations around the country – brought Carmody to national attention, and painted a remarkably lyrical image of black life in Brisbane:

  Well Job and me and Jesus, sitting underneath that Indooroopilly Bridge

  Watchin’ that blazing sun go down behind the tall-treed mountain ridge

  The land’s our heritage and spirit here, the rightful culture’s black

  And we’re sittin’ here just wondering, when we gonna get that land back

  It quickly became clear at Triple Zed that a solitary, pre-recorded Murri ‘Hour’ was inadequate to cater to the Aboriginal community’s needs. Just as Radio Skid Row had been forced to scale up its black airtime, after 12 months Murri Hour was expanded to eight live-to-air hours a week. So keen was the community to become involved that, during evening shows, busloads of up to 80 people would turn up at the station’s campus studios. The program soon expanded again, to 16 hours a week. The show was attracting upwards of 120 phone calls per shift, putting pressure on a range of other interest groups at the station.7

  Louise Butt: As Murri Radio developed – and obviously out of respect for the self-determination issues that are involved in Indigenous politics – the collective took a bit of a hands-off approach, and that could have caused a few problems . . . It was difficult, because the Murri Hour program was obviously so needed that as it grew it became a focal point for the Indigenous community, and it started to have its own independent life.

  Tensions were rising on several fronts. The slow drift back towards a higher percentage of block programming meant that Triple Zed was moving ever further away from its original mass-minority audience aspirations. The confrontational politics of Murri Hour was alienating listeners the station could ill afford to lose.

  Ross Watson: We would have people ringing up saying we were being outrageous and we were being racist, that sort of thing. Sometimes we’d try talking to them, and other times we’d end up telling them to get fucked. We got a lot of that sort of stuff.

  Tiga Bayles, then working at Radio Redfern, would later learn to temper his approach.

  Tiga Bayles: We called things as they were. We identified the racist businesses, the racist police. We spoke openly about the racist policies and practices that were taking place on a daily basis. And so a lot of non-Indigenous people found us offensive.

  The occasional abrasiveness of the on-air content was matched by an increased militancy in Aboriginal music, a trend that was entirely in keeping with the era. While Midnight Oil went on their own fact-finding tour of Aboriginal communities with the Warumpi Band, Kev Carmody was stockpiling a number of songs dedicated to the upcoming 1988 Bicentenary. Even more than the Commonwealth Games, the planned celebrations of the country’s colonisation represented an opportunity for Aboriginal people to contradict white Australia’s sunny view of its own history.

  Kev Carmody: My mother said you’ve got so many songs about this Bicentennial stuff, why don’t we put an album out and see if we can counteract it, to the best of our ability. And so that’s what I did; my family put together enough money to do a little eight-track recording; I went to Sydney, and I recorded at Megaphon Studios . . . Most of the stuff is one take.

  The resulting album, Pillars Of Society, was relentless. The songs fairly glowed with anger; the truths they spoke so unbearable, they still await official acknowledgment. Bruce Elder’s review for Rolling Stone – ‘The best album ever released by an Aboriginal musician and arguably the best protest album ever made in Australia’ – was incorporated into the album’s cover art upon its release by Larrikin Records. One song, Black Deaths In Custody, anticipated a royal commission into the issue:

  I say, show me the justice, to be had here in this land

  Show us blacks the justice, for every black human being

  Show us blacks the justice, in this white democracy

  When you can execute us without a trial, while we’re held in custody

  Where Midnight Oil’s Beds Are Burning spoke of ‘we’, and Archie Roach limited his own accounts of personal tragedy mainly to ‘I’, it is perhaps unsurprising that Carmody’s accusatory ‘you’ would prove too difficult for white audiences to swallow.

  While Triple Zed continued to provide a platform for the Murri Show, diverging interests made a split inevitable. Ross Watson spent most of the latter half of the ’80s jumping through the necessary hoops to win the Brisbane Aboriginal community its own radio licence, eventually granted by the then Australian Broadcasting Authority in 1991.8 The debut of 4AAA Murri Country in April 1993 represented the culmination of his work. Operating out of well-resourced studios in the south-west suburb of Fairfield, 4AAA is Brisbane’s only country music-format broadcaster.

  Under the management of Tiga Bayles, the station is careful in how it delivers its message.

  Tiga Bayles: If we wanted to reach people, if we wanted to be a station that anyone could listen to and not be offended, if we really wanted to make changes within the society, if we wanted more pe
ople to tune in and not less people, we had to change the way we delivered the message . . . Also, because we’re funded, we’re not volunteer-based or dependent, [so] we’re able to place demands on our staff!

  CHAPTER TEN

  too much acid

  Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.

  – Euripides

  Punk never really died in Brisbane. There was always something to complain about, and an anti-authoritarian streak – fomented so effectively by the police – ran deep in the city’s youth culture. During the long years from 1981 to 1989, by which time the alternative music explosion was just around the corner, new bands continued to spring forth, thrashing out minor variations on a sound most believed exhausted.

  There were still a few gems. The Vampire Lovers’ Buzzsaw Popstar was one: derivative but fabulous in spite of itself, it sounded like a lost Damned single, and inadvertently prefigured that band’s Gothic period. (The Screaming Tribesmen’s classic 1984 EP Date With A Vampyre pursued a similar theme and was huge in the band’s home town: despite the heat, the Goth subculture has proven mysteriously enduring up north.)

  The majority of witnesses to the second-generation punk explosion in Brisbane, however, were searching for fresh musical avenues, most of them south of the border. This was understandable. The Go-Betweens were going from strength to strength internationally; Died Pretty and the Tribesmen were blazing trails of their own; Mark Callaghan’s new band GANGgajang was a mainstream hit. There was simply no precedent for bands achieving any kind of commercial profile while remaining in Brisbane.

  Those who stayed behind – or came back – were free to make music chiefly for their own amusement, a different kind of recognition that achieving any kind of commercial success from Brisbane was impossible. While groups like Xero and Lovs é Blur balanced their eccentricities with sufficient concessions to structure and melody to remain alluring, dire acts like the Pits and Pork eschewed any attempts at popularity for the sake of being as annoying as musically possible. They had their adherents, though: