In fact, Brazil (who lived in a St Lucia apartment owned by her parents) represented the constituency that had elected her rather well. Almost all of her executive were based on the campus colleges, overwhelmingly the preserve of the wealthiest sector of the student population. During her year in office, funds for college activities enjoyed a healthy increase, while the budget for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students was slashed.13
The stalemate over the petition and continued chaos on campus had wearied the university administration, with the deputy vice-chancellor, Professor Ralph Parsons, calling publicly on the union to submit to fresh elections in accordance with its own constitution.
Douglas Porter: Ralph was a very, very proper person. He was as straight as a die, and he could not bring his mind to bear on the way in which the student union executive attempted to manipulate the situation. Whether they were correct or not in law, he clearly had a problem with their ethics.
Julian Sheezel: The university clearly buckled to most of the demands of Triple Zed and the left-wing members of the student union council. The university wanted a very quiet life; they made it well known that as long as peace was maintained on campus they didn’t really care what happened to student funds.
By the middle of May the petition had wound its way to the Supreme Court. Although finding no serious problem with the signatures, Justice Paul de Jersey nevertheless struck the document down on the basis of its wording. Fortunately, the kindly judge took the time to draw up his preferred sentence construction before sending the plaintiffs on their way. Within days of submitting the re-worded question to the student body, a second petition had gathered over 3000 signatures. Finally bowing to the inevitable, the executive resigned on 14 July.
The week earlier Triple Zed had made its scheduled move to new studios in the adjoining suburb of Toowong. The location would quickly prove unsuitable, but for the moment the station was riding a tremendous wave of support.
David Lennon: Gordon Fletcher and myself had been keeping the financial side of the station afloat. And then the eviction happened, and within two weeks we had some astronomical amount of money donated to us. Really, I think Victoria Brazil did the station a huge favour; it could have very well died a dribbly death at that stage if something like that didn’t happen.
Students were suddenly more interested in politics than ever before. The union elections of September 1989 were the biggest ever: more than 5000 students turned out to vote, more than a quarter of the campus at that time. Jane Lye’s group, Reform, won a landslide victory, while the Semper editorship was claimed by a group calling themselves the Doug Porter All Stars, a pun on then-popular comedy trio the Doug Anthony All Stars. John Birmingham – now married to Lye – was a frequent contributor, occasionally in the guise of his alter ego, Harrison Biscuit.
Most of the members of the 1989 executive have gone on to successful legal, medical and commercial careers. Julian Sheezel has maintained his political interests: a former president of the Australian Liberal Students Federation and advisor to the iron-plated Bronwyn Bishop MP, in 2003 he was appointed state director of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party. While comfortable that Triple Zed’s eventual departure from campus was for the long-term benefit of the student population, Sheezel suggests in hindsight that the battle that followed was a product of the political and moral certainty typical of the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Julian Sheezel: At the age of 18 you have the advantage of being more pure in your motives, be that on the conservative side of politics or on the left. You tend to think, well, this is the right thing to do. I passionately believed that this was correct, that Triple Zed had no place on campus, and if I was castigated publicly for upholding that view, I was quite happy to wear that at the time.
Victoria Brazil, for her part, steadfastly refuses to discuss the events surrounding her union presidency. While the university claims her security was never in danger while on campus, she was certainly the victim of sustained harassment and vilification for years afterwards. Refusing an offer of a safe seat from the National Party in the lead-up to the 1989 state election, she retreated entirely from view following her graduation. While some former allies and opponents suggest she was manipulated by her more astute peers, not all are so forgiving.
Jane Lye: I think Victoria was very naive about the whole thing . . . Of course unfortunately for her, all of the people around her were far more politically savvy and had different agendas, so suddenly this shy country girl who’d never had her head out of a book found herself at the centre of this enormous fight.
James Gifford: She was never a political animal. There was so much infamy involved in the whole thing, she just wanted to get on with life, and become a normal person and not some right-wing freak. She was totally demonised; she was made out to be a really evil wicked witch, which she wasn’t.
Jeff Cheverton: I think she’d be about as innocent as Pauline Hanson, actually.
CHAPTER TWELVE
cyclone hits expo
The Fitzgerald Inquiry was in recess when the world came to Brisbane on 31 March 1988. This was just as well. The suffocating internal paroxysm Queensland was enduring was entirely at odds with the tourist-brochure marketing of Expo. If Brisbane was growing up, it was a painfully self-conscious metamorphosis.
There was an irony in this. More so than the Commonwealth Games, Expo ’88 continues to enjoy its status as the symbolic turning point for its host city, the moment wherein the most insular of Australian capitals threw open its doors to the world. But such openness contained hidden dangers for the ageing junta that queued up to bathe in the afterglow.
Anne Jones: When Brisbane was smaller, they could shut things down without too much difficulty, but as it developed and became a real city – which the Bjelke-Petersen regime wanted, because of the economic benefits – with that came a demand for a lifestyle that was something more than what you might find in Kingaroy. Brisbane was turning into a big city, which was making it culturally more diverse, and that was something the Nationals couldn’t control.
Like most gigantic public events, Expo brought with it a darker side that few cared to acknowledge. The huge sails that shaded much of the South Brisbane site also helped cover up the monstrous redevelopment that had turned one of inner Brisbane’s oldest and poorest areas inside out. The suburbs of South Brisbane and West End were dominated by students, migrants, Aboriginal people, the elderly and the alone. Almost all of them rented their accommodation.
As Expo approached, hundreds were forced to leave as landlords raised rents or evicted tenants with a view to either refurbishment or attracting higher-paying Expo staff and tourists. Boarding houses were torn down and crisp new apartment blocks erected. No one was prepared for the housing crisis: while the state and federal governments blamed each other, welfare agencies did their best to cope with the human spillage.
In a live-to-air gig at Triple Zed, Choo Dikka Dikka (named after the sound made by traffic lights at pedestrian crossings) made their wistful protest after a severe thunderstorm in November 1987 tore the Expo sails apart:
Cyclone hits Expo, hits the very spot
Cyclone hits Expo and destroys the fuckin’ lot!
The event itself was, it must be said, hugely successful. Few Brisbane residents could possibly have missed it; millions of visitors poured in from interstate and overseas. All that grated was the enormity of the contrast between the Brisbane being sold to the world and the real Brisbane sweating it out in the witness box. Even the vice money doled out to Terry Lewis and the Licensing Branch by bagman Jack Herbert was referred to in-house as ‘The Joke’: something you were either in on, or you weren’t. There was nothing terribly sophisticated about corruption Queensland-style.
Peter Walsh: I was living in a warehouse in Fortitude Valley when the cops shut off three lanes in Ann Street so a crane could lower a roulette whe
el into the building opposite mine. They shut off three lanes to do it, and there they were saying there were no illegal casinos!
Then a 19-year-old student, Peter Walsh (no relation to the Apartments’ Peter Milton Walsh, who humorously refers to his namesake as ‘The Lesser’) created the Livid Festival with his then partner, artist Natalie Jeremijenko, as a kind of anti-Expo. The initial idea, to attract an all-Brisbane line-up of artists that had been forced to leave the city to find an audience, served as both a tribute to and condemnation of the city that spawned them. Originally intended as a one-off, the first bill, for 21 January 1989, featured the Go-Betweens, Chris Bailey, Died Pretty and the Ups and Downs.
Peter Walsh: I just hated the way that everyone said that Expo was the turning point for Brisbane and that this was the thing that was going to put Brisbane on the map, because there was so much out there that had already put Brisbane on the map . . . Some of the greatest bands in the world had come from here, and they weren’t getting any recognition.
The establishment of the festival itself was little short of a miracle. Walsh knew so little about event promotion at the time that, when someone later asked him if he was the promoter, he said no; he didn’t know what a promoter was.
Peter Walsh: We were both university students. We had some obvious problems – we had no money, we had no idea how to organise it, and we had no idea how to get in contact with bands. We got around the money bit when I went to a credit union one day and said I wanted to borrow $4000 to buy a car, then Natalie went the next day and said she wanted $4000 to buy a car. So we had $8000, which was enough to get the tickets and the posters printed. That certainly wasn’t enough to run a festival, but no one asked us [how much money we had]. It was a wing and a prayer; we just didn’t care, you know. We were so into the idea of meeting the Go-Betweens that we didn’t give a fuck!
The Go-Betweens were brought to the festival via their manager, Roger Grierson, who years earlier had brought Tex Perkins to Sydney. A friend of Walsh’s happened to work at Grierson’s favoured local in Sydney. Walsh’s friend asked Grierson; Grierson said yes; and Grierson liked Walsh’s idea enough to be of critical assistance in helping get the show off the ground.
For the Go-Betweens themselves, much had changed. After several years in London, the group had been signed to Mushroom Records, and had based themselves in Sydney. Two years earlier the band had become a five-piece with the recruitment of multi-instrumentalist Amanda Brown; later, bass player Robert Vickers departed, to be replaced by former Xero guitarist John Willsteed. Adding to an already volatile internal chemistry, Brown and Grant McLennan were romantically linked, long after the relationship between Robert Forster and Lindy Morrison had ended. The group would split a year later.
Musically, however, the band was at its peak. With the release of their most commercial and in many ways their best album, 16 Lovers Lane, the Go-Betweens’ profile had never been higher.
Robert Forster: It was our juggernaut phase, where we could say to a record company, this is what we want to do, and they’d push a lot of money across the table. None of it would go into our pockets; it would go into making records and touring . . . It was a fairly typical major-label situation, where you’re earning $300 a week but there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars flying around you.
The lead single was Streets Of Your Town, the closest the Go-Betweens ever came to a hit. John Willsteed – who played the heavenly acoustic solo at the song’s centre – describes it, perfectly, as ‘like summer coming out of the stereo’. As instantly appealing as anything from Crowded House’s Temple Of Low Men (also released in August 1988), the song gained the band its first commercial airplay, only to inexplicably stall just outside the top 40.
Ironically, with the attempted eviction of Triple Zed still fresh in the minds of students, and the union buildings under siege, the first Livid Festival was held on the grounds of the University of Queensland, where Forster and McLennan had met more than a decade before. With Forster dressed in a bright orange flared bodysuit, the Go-Betweens’ performance that night ranked among their most memorable.
Peter Walsh: People often ask me what was the best show you ever saw at a Livid Festival; I always say the Go-Betweens. They played Karen, which they hardly ever did, and broke halfway through that into Patti Smith’s version of Gloria. Then they broke halfway through that while Robert lay on his back reciting poetry, then they went back into Gloria, then back into Karen . . . Grant and Robert have both said to me at various times that it was one of the best, if not the best, Go-Betweens shows ever. And to me, it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen.
After succeeding Joh Bjelke-Petersen as premier in late 1987, Mike Ahern had attempted to distance himself and his party from its tainted past with a promise to implement the recommendations of the Fitzgerald Inquiry ‘lock, stock and barrel’. But the government could not hold the line with any credibility: Ahern’s ministry was dominated by his predecessor’s faithful servants, and he himself had been a part of Bjelke-Petersen’s cabinet since 1980. As Fitzgerald prepared his report, the Nationals were nervous and divided.
With the party’s support in freefall, even in its Bible-Belt heartland, some members clearly felt that a campaign against sin in all its forms would help light their path to political salvation. Claiming that ordinary Queenslanders were less concerned with allegations of political corruption than with the decline of so-called family values, however, was a complete misreading of the fundamental shift of consciousness among the state’s mainstream middle class. No incident illustrated this misinterpretation more than the police raid on Rocking Horse Records on 14 February 1989.
Rocking Horse was, by then, one of the country’s oldest independent record stores. After moving from its tiny original shop under the stairwell of Rowes Arcade in 1979, it was well established in slightly roomier surroundings at 158 Adelaide Street. In a typical police entrapment operation, an undercover officer from the Licensing Branch cased the shop, seeking out rude records for, according to Warwick Vere, ‘a wild Valentine’s Day party’. Later that morning, four uniformed police raided the store, seizing around $500 worth of stock and charging Vere under the Vagrants, Gaming and Other Offences Act for exhibiting and selling obscene material.
The origin of the raid itself was a curiosity. Cosmic Records in Ipswich, west of Brisbane, had already incurred the attention of the Licensing Branch following a complaint by a local fundamentalist preacher, the Reverend John Pasterkamp. (Cosmic, keen to avoid litigation costs, meekly withdrew the offending items from sale.) Pasterkamp claimed to have made his original complaint to then federal Labor member and later governor-general, Bill Hayden, who in turn referred the matter to the state attorney-general, Paul Clauson. A political neophyte, Clauson then wrote to Pasterkamp pledging the government’s full support, pre-empting the city raid.
Warwick Vere: The police basically admitted to me that it was a ministerial thing; that they didn’t want to pursue it. [The government] was on the ropes by then, they were trying the old Rona Joyner kind of fire and brimstone rubbish. They were clutching at straws, basically, and they grabbed the wrong straw.
The records and cassettes seized were indicative of the investigative powers of a police force that was officially unable to find brothels and casinos. Titles included Do The Shag (an instrumental number by early ’60s band the Champs); the Sonic Youth EP Master Dik; and Dickcheese, by Sydney favourites the Hard-Ons. Also taken were items by New York provocateur Lydia Lunch and the huge-selling Guns n’ Roses album Appetite For Destruction, which already carried a sticker warning its contents may offend.
More revealing, however, was the seizure of records by the Dead Kennedys, whose Festival Hall show in 1983 had prompted such outlandish police attention. In the US, the San Francisco group had long been a target of the religious right: singer Jello Biafra had earlier been driven close to bankruptcy after being forced to defend himself against si
milar charges of obscenity.1 The Dead Kennedys’ albums Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death (which included the earlier single Too Drunk To Fuck) and Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables (specifically, the album track I Kill Children) would form the centre of the police case against Rocking Horse and Vere.
One week after the raid R.E.M. played an extraordinary show at Festival Hall. On their final tour as a support band, the Go-Betweens dedicated their song The Clarke Sisters to the staff at Rocking Horse. Michael Stipe ended the evening by repeatedly singing the Velvet Underground’s After Hours, refusing to leave the stage until the crowd dispersed.
Queensland had long boasted its own Film and Literature Boards of Review: the year before, The Last Temptation Of Christ had been banned from screening in the state’s cinemas. Several years earlier, Triple Zed had fallen foul of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal for broadcasting (among other items) the Dead Kennedys’ Too Drunk To Fuck. Station journalist Linden Woodward responded by preparing a deliberately scholarly program on the social history of bad language; shortly after, Woodward and then station coordinator Haydn Thompson were hauled before the tribunal to explain themselves.
Linden Woodward: Language was a significant issue in Queensland at that time. If you got arrested in Queensland in those days, as likely as not you’d get charged with resisting arrest, possibly with assaulting police and certainly with indecent language. And I used to think, well, who exactly was offended by this language – the police?
I think Haydn was immensely amused, because I sounded terribly meek and mild, and here I was standing before the tribunal and explaining to David Jones, who was the head of the tribunal, why ‘cunt’ was really an important word. It was tripping off his tongue by the end.
When the tribunal praised Triple Zed and Woodward for producing such a fine and responsible piece of radio, it effectively gave the green light for the contextual use of bad language in future Australian broadcasting and public performance. Queensland law, however, had yet to catch up. Three months before the Rocking Horse bust, Stipendiary Magistrate Don Fardon had found comedian Rodney Rude guilty of obscenity for uttering the word ‘cocksucker’ on stage. Fardon was thus hand-picked by the prosecution to preside over the case against Warwick Vere.
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