Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  But the discussion never happened.

  The new executive had been in office less than a week when it made its move. At 4.17am on 14 December, Brazil, along with other executive members and four security guards, entered the Triple Zed studios, serving an eviction notice – effective immediately – to the two graveyard announcers on duty, Mark Solway and Stefan Armbruster.

  David Lennon: I got a call at about 4.30 saying they’d just been evicted, so I told them to stay outside and I turned up there post-haste. They wouldn’t let me in, but they let Mark in for some reason, so I told him to go into the newsroom and get a tape recorder and microphone, which he did. I called Gordon Fletcher and Anita [Earl, announcing coordinator] and we drove up to the transmitter site on Mt Coot-tha, and on the way up we recorded an emergency broadcast explaining what happened. We plugged the Superscope directly into the transmitter and started broadcasting the message over and over.

  Brazil’s team had hardly been encouraged in its actions. In a file note dated 21 February 1989, the university registrar, Douglas Porter, confirms that a meeting was held on 12 December with executive members Cameron Spenceley and Alastair Furnival, who requested an opinion on whether the university would support action by the union to ‘deal with’ Triple Zed. Porter advised that this was not a matter for the university to decide, counselling the union only to remain within the law.9

  The following day, the executive received a three-page legal briefing from solicitors Litster Mann and Ffrench. This strongly advised the union to give a ‘reasonable’ period of notice (classified as three to four weeks) in order to evict Triple Zed with legal certainty. It also made the point, however, that the station was unlikely to possess the financial means to challenge any eviction in the courts.

  Julian Sheezel: I don’t believe that Triple Zed would have moved off campus after one or two months and I don’t believe the university would have moved them off campus either . . . They would have used every means available to them to frustrate an eviction order, from legal challenges to calls for special elections and, failing that, occupation of the student union’s premises. Anything to buy time! They only had to hold out until the next elections and they probably would have been safe.

  Sheezel rejects suggestions the executive had no student mandate to evict the station, insisting that its actions were consistent with its policy platform of sound financial management. But there was, naturally, more to it than that. Commerce representative James Gifford, who was not a party to the decision, argues the executive was driven at least in part by its overwhelming ideological conviction: Brazil herself hung a photograph of then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on her office wall.

  James Gifford: I suspect that they felt, here’s a really big leftie target – let’s attack [it], defeat them on their domain. They fundamentally believed that the left was bad and it needed to be undermined and fought, and that was a good way of fighting it: to shut down their main source of communication.

  Julian Sheezel: What we had to decide was whether it was appropriate for an organisation that was not associated with the student body, and that the students had not agreed or endorsed to give money to, to continue to receive student money . . . [We decided] that we had a fiduciary responsibility, consistent with good corporate governance, to sever our relationship with Triple Zed.

  Regardless of the executive’s motives, they failed to appreciate the level of residual support still attached to Triple Zed, or to anticipate the vehemence with which its action would be greeted. Within half an hour of the emergency broadcast going to air from Mt Coot-tha, hundreds of enraged supporters were massing outside the station headquarters. The result was inevitable: shortly after 1pm, supporters poured into the station, sweeping security aside. They weren’t met with great resistance.

  Douglas Porter: They reoccupied the premises and kicked young Cameron [Spenceley] out. I asked him why he didn’t stay – possession being nine-tenths of the law – and he basically said there was a howling mob outside and he was in fear of his life, so he left.

  A young writer, John Birmingham, was commissioned to cover the demonstration for Rolling Stone magazine. Then 24, Birmingham was in the period of personal itinerancy that he would later document in the celebrated He Died With A Felafel In His Hand, and was thus well placed to cover what developed into a rolling series of occupations of the union premises.

  John Birmingham: I tended to take a different approach to most reporters who’d just turn up and do a stock-standard violent student demo story. I decided I was going to be there for the long haul, and if it took a week of hanging around with these crusty motherfuckers that was what I was going to do.

  About an hour or so after I got there, people had begun to work out how they were going to get back into the station . . . [Triple Zed] was in the basement of the union building and it was like a rat’s maze down there; there were any number of ways of getting in.

  By this stage the union’s offices were being occupied along with the radio station. The police were not long in arriving. And in true gonzo tradition, Birmingham had no problem with involving himself in the action he was supposed to be reporting on.

  John Birmingham: Triple Zed by this stage was broadcasting the whole thing over the airwaves, but also over the loudspeakers, and continually looping the song Pig City over and over again. This of course was getting on the nerves of the cops, to the point where one of them ended up banging her car into a railing with a big crunch, which caused a huge cheer among the protesters and even more consternation among the cops, which probably resulted in an extra half a dozen heads getting broken later on that afternoon.

  Anyway, it went on for a couple of hours. The cops eventually decided that they were going to kick everybody out. I went upstairs to watch them break into the union offices. It was quite interesting; I knew enough not to stand in front of the cops as they came in the door, because they get the blood up and just mow everybody down. So I went outside and stood with the 30 or 40 police who were going in. They tried to tell me to fuck off but I showed them my press pass – which was completely bogus, I’d just put it together myself with a bit of cardboard and laminate and colour-photocopied Rolling Stone letterhead on top – and they grudgingly agreed I had a right to be there.

  So they went in, slammed the shit out of everybody, and I went in with them. It was quite funny, because the last two blokes in the line were probationary constables who had been whipped into quite a state by their mates. By the time I got in on the tail of these two probationary guys, they’d got themselves worked up for nothing, because there was nobody left for them to hit; everybody had been subdued.

  One of them was literally fucking mad, foaming at the mouth, looking left-right, left-right, left-right . . . I was standing on a desk by this stage with my tape recorder running to get the whole thing. He came at me, I showed him the pass, he veered off, ran to a wall and there was a telephone on the wall. And he ripped the telephone off the wall, threw it on the ground and kicked it across the room. I wish I’d had a video camera! It was all good fun.

  But the police were unwilling to risk the possible legal consequences of re-evicting Triple Zed themselves. None of those who occupied the station can remember very much about the days that followed.

  David Lennon: It was just a big long party; there was lots of running around, skinny-dipping in the vice-chancellor’s pool . . . Yeah, that was the most enjoyable week of my life.

  Triple Zed was not the only communications outlet in the union’s sights. Curiously, despite the election of an ultra-conservative union executive, Semper had remained in the hands of the radical left: editors Jeff Cheverton and Bree McKilligan had run on a socialist gay and lesbian ticket. Cheverton guesses the anomaly was probably a result of the ticket’s name – Semper Extraordinaire – being shortened to SEX on ballot sheets, a quirk that saw them across the line despite being subjected to a malevolent smear ca
mpaign.

  Jeff Cheverton: They tried to be a bit clever. The campaign flyers had something like, ‘Jeff is a caring, idealistic sort of guy, the fact that he’s gay doesn’t enter into it,’ and they put it out all over campus with a little photograph of me. It was pretty amazing.

  Two days prior to the attempted eviction of Triple Zed, Cheverton received notice of a Student Representative Council meeting scheduled for 21 January. The agenda included the demotion of the Semper editors to part-time roles and the appointment of Cameron Spenceley (who had stood unsuccessfully against the pair in the preceding election) as editorial supervisor. In addition, it was proposed that Spenceley be charged with producing the handbook for the upcoming campus orientation week for new students, traditionally the province of the Semper editors.

  For Brazil and her executive, the political platform Semper embodied was, like Triple Zed, unrepresentative of the mainstream student population. This was entirely true, but ignored the fact that the students who had elected the Semper editors were, by accident or design, the same students that had appointed Brazil president. In the end, Cheverton and McKilligan held onto their jobs, but the attack furthered suspicions that the executive was more concerned with silencing their opposition on campus than it was with financial accountability.

  There were reasonable grounds for suspecting that at least some members of Brazil’s group boasted strong connections at government level, especially as the state government (which was in the process of preparing a bill outlawing compulsory student unionism) repeatedly came out in support of the executive’s actions. After issuing a second eviction order giving the station notice to quit by 19 January, Brazil set the scene for another almighty showdown when, in a meeting with Douglas Porter and the vice-chancellor, Brian Wilson, she requested written confirmation of the union’s occupancy and control of their buildings.

  Porter writes that, on questioning, Brazil revealed police had requested the confirmation as a basis for taking action against the station. Disturbed, Wilson refused. Less than an hour after the meeting with Brazil, Wilson took a call from the state director-general of education on the request of the minister, Brian Littleproud, in which he was pressured to provide the written confirmation Brazil required.10 With hundreds of students continuing to occupy the station, the second eviction was forestalled.

  In fact, the university administration was as keen as the union executive to be rid of Triple Zed. Porter’s note records that the station ‘has not been a comfortable tenant and creates occasional problems for the union and the university through irresponsible actions and sometimes through its broadcasts’.11 The station’s position on campus had become untenable. The occupation had resulted in a string of well-founded complaints: the station had never been designed to house 100 or more hard-partying defenders of the faith.

  In a meeting attended by Porter, Brazil, Cameron Spenceley, Gordon Fletcher and station director Charles Scandrett, the station eventually agreed to vacate its premises by 8 July 1989. Ironically, the union’s ham-fisted actions had probably improved Triple Zed’s bargaining position with the long-suffering administration.

  First semester arrived in late February, the university ankle-deep in flyers.

  Under the terms of the student union constitution, the executive could be forced to hold a referendum to determine whether fresh elections should be held in the event of a petition gathering the support of more than 10 per cent of the student body. After a pre-dawn eviction and a violent counter-occupation, the high moral ground of due process remained available to anyone willing to seize it. A law student, Jane Lye, waded into the murk after a friendly offer of assistance from an unexpected quarter.

  Jane Lye: That’s the role that I thought I could play some part in, because it was the boring stuff that no one really wanted to get into. And there were actually a couple of law lecturers who came and offered support – they just said look, we’re happy to look into where you stand constitutionally, and I thought well, that’s the logical thing that I can help with.

  Lye, whose eminently reasonable public manner belied a mind like a cobra, contrasted effectively against Brazil’s shrill defensiveness. The executive was losing the PR battle to its more media-savvy opponents. Above all, their timing was lousy: as Sheezel admits, storming a radio station before dawn during summer holidays was easily depicted as being ‘consistent with the hallmarks of the National Party during the ’70s and ’80s’. The day after the eviction Courier-Mail cartoonist Sean Leahy portrayed Brazil and her well-dressed supporters as a convoy of jackbooted Joh clones. Their next move would do nothing to dispel this impression.

  On 23 February a petition consisting of 2200 signatures (400 more than required, and well over the approximately 1300 votes that had elected the executive) was handed to Brazil, who, amid uproar, dismissed it as a forgery. It was a fatal error.

  Julian Sheezel: Politically the executive’s mistake was not accepting the petition when it first came in, because at that stage we had significant student support for what had occurred. Where we made a mistake was trying to avoid a referendum, which certainly weakened our position with the student population.

  John Birmingham: I always contended that if those guys had actually gone to the student body and asked for an endorsement of what they’d done in kicking Triple Zed off campus, they would have got it. Because by that stage it had become pretty much completely divorced from the middle-class mainstream population. Realistically they had no reason and no right to be there any more.

  With Triple Zed now locked into moving, the executive’s actions ensured that its own legitimacy became the central issue on campus. The demonstrations that followed – a rolling series of occupations of the union premises, intermittently broken up by police, hired security and Brazil supporters – were some of the most violent in memory. Short of a constant police presence, however, there was no way of keeping the mob at bay. John Birmingham, a self-confessed ‘enthusiastic member of that mob’, was one who took up residence over the Easter break.

  John Birmingham: I had no permanent address at that point; I was supposed to be house-sitting for a couple of friends in Auchenflower, but I was hardly ever there. They had a cat I was supposed to feed. They were vegans and this thing was completely malnourished, so I’d pop around every couple of days with a carton of chocolate milk and a meat lover’s pizza, throw the pizza on the ground, pour the milk into a bowl and go back to the occupation for another 48 hours.

  It was funny, because you had a lot of weedy, underfed, often vegetarian students going up against these big, blocky, steroid-abusing nightclub bouncers who would just hammer on them like machines. You’d get four or five students on two or three nightclub bouncers, and the bouncers would just bash and bash and bash. But eventually there were so many students that their arms would get tired, and the tide would just roll over them.

  Eventually we all ended up outside the president’s office. There was myself and a guy called Bill Ferguson, a pillar of the community these days. Bill was a long stringy character who looked like a cowboy junkie. There were a couple of hundred of us beating on the doors of Victoria’s office. Finally Bill looked up and said, ‘Look at the roof, it’s all tiles – we can push up and get into the ceiling space and go down.’

  I dropped onto the floor of the office and the next thing I remember was Bill pouring through the roof like a liquid metal terminator. It was fantastic. It’s very rare in modern life that you get to whale on people you really don’t like very much and we were all lashing out at each other. Of course as soon as they had to start beating up the people who were coming through the ceiling, they lost control of the door, and hundreds of people poured in.

  Whereupon, of course, the party started all over again.

  John Birmingham: It was quite marvellous actually. The right made a lot of accusations about people having sex on desks and stuff like that, which at the time I just dismissed com
pletely out of hand. I didn’t realise it was true until I spoke to the culprits years later! But it was a huge party. There were a lot of people like me, who didn’t have a place to live, who just took over the building for a couple of weeks, and I was there for all of it, except for the occasional trip back to Auchenflower to give the cat a pizza.

  We got a TV in and hired videos. Every night there was a big party with lots of drugs and booze and probably quite a bit of unauthorised rumpy-pumpy on the president’s desk. But what are you gonna do? Everybody was full of piss and bad manners and savage righteousness. Looking back on it now, that sort of bad behaviour was completely fucking infantile, but everybody was infantile, in their late teens. I was one of the oldest ones there! So the protesters, myself included, didn’t cover themselves in glory, but we had a fucking good time. I don’t resile from any of it.

  While the ‘unauthorised rumpy-pumpy’ carried on in the union building, the university administration had accepted a certified copy of the petition against the union executive, which it declared valid after a careful count. The executive, however, was unmoved. It preferred the verdict of its own hand-picked appointee, law student Anthony Ryan, who found sufficient irregularities in the signatures to pronounce the petition null and void.

  Brazil’s own rhetoric was contradictory. Although several members of her executive were members of the Liberal Party and Brazil was a card-carrying National, the ‘real students’, she claimed, were not interested in politics at all. While insisting she would complete the job she had been elected to do, her favourite strategy was to claim the tacit support of the 15,000 students that hadn’t bothered to vote at all. ‘It’s not trendy to be idealistic,’ she said. ‘It’s trendy to get out on the stock market to get money for that BMW, to listen to FM-104 [Triple M] and drink Powers.’12