7.Information on Murphy’s Marauders and the Task Force courtesy of J S Reid, pers. comm., January 2002. See also interview with the Brisbane Devotee (aka Reid) in the Cane Toad Times, ‘Australia’s Future?’ issue, 1979, pp. 7–10.
8.Reid, January 2002.
9.Clinton Walker reported on this gig in Pulp: ‘What the paper failed to mention, however, was the kids bashed by cops, the cops posing as punks in paint-splattered shirts and busting anyone for swearing in conversation, and the kids who were harassed by cops as they tried to go home as instructed. “We’ll stop any punk rock in Brisbane,” one cop was heard to utter.’ Reprinted in Stranded: The Secret History Of Australian Independent Music, Sydney, Pan Macmillan 1996, pp. 39–40.
10.Rob Cameron, ‘Pub Rock Revived’, Semper, 7 June 1978, p. 33.
11.See for example Richard McGregor’s review of Lethal Weapons in the Australian issue of Rolling Stone, 27 July 1978; also Viola Sharp in Semper, 24 May 1978, p. 35; Richard Guilliatt, ‘Sign To Suicide Or Suicide To Sign?’, RAM, 2 June 1978, p. 9.
12.While the labels on the original single mark the B-side as 1977 and the A-side as 1978, Razar’s Marty Burke claims Warren Lamond told him (in a drunken moment) that 1977 was a ruse, designed to indicate the Leftovers had beaten their peers into the studio, if not onto plastic.
13.Read more about the Leftovers’ brief but eventful career in the excellent liner notes of The Fucken Leftovers Hate You, released on CD by the Dropkick label in 2003. The slipcase features a heartfelt memoir by associate David Holliday (who helped fund the band’s single), as well as reprinting several articles and letters.
Chapter 6. Swept Away
1.D Nichols, The Go-Betweens, Sydney, Allen & Unwin 1997, p. 57. A photograph of one of these shows is featured in the book’s photographic insert.
2.Dennis Cantwell’s father, who was working in real estate at the time, did some work scouting locations for the program.
Chapter 7. Last of the Leather Age
1.A letter from Shepherd to the fan club was reprinted in Vivien Johnson’s biography Radio Birdman, Melbourne, Sheldon Booth 1990, p. 79.
2.B Shepherd, liner notes to Fun Things EP, Pennimann 2000.
3.ibid.
4.The reality is slightly more complicated than Peno remembers. A Stand Alone was among four songs recorded for the band’s sole, unreleased studio recording in mid 1980, while Igloo, according to Medew, was written immediately afterwards. The three other tracks: Real Gone; Time Moves Fast; It’s So Hard. This recording has been bootlegged, appearing on European compilations of the Screaming Tribesmen.
5.In 2003 the EP was remixed by Murray Shepherd for a new compilation, The Savage Beat Of The Screaming Tribesmen, and now packs a wallop to rival the Fun Things.
6.D Laing, CD liner notes to Do The Pop! The Australian Garage Rock Sound 1976–87, Shock 2002, p. 17.
7.Just Skin, Lost, This Reason and Through My Heart all began life as End songs before their appearance on a series of Died Pretty albums, Through My Heart as late as 1993’s Trace.
Chapter 8. Everybody Moves
1.Quoted in T Creswell, ‘Taking the Low Road to the Top’, Rolling Stone 472 (Australia), July 1992, p. 77.
2.Quote attributed to Ian Sinnamon, then the head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Queensland. Source: Elaine van Kempen, http://www.nationaltrustqld.org/cgi-bin1/memories.pl.
3.G McLennan, quoted in liner notes for CD reissue of Send Me A Lullaby, Circus 2002.
4.C Walker, Stranded: The Secret History Of Australian Independent Music, Sydney, Pan Macmillan 1996, p. 105.
5.R Fitzgerald, From 1915 To The Early 1980s: A History Of Queensland, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press 1984, pp. 584–587. Hinze’s even more draconian draft legislation enabled not just police but private security firms to search and detain suspected anti-games protesters without a warrant, and conferred upon them immunity from prosecution for any assault or wrongful imprisonment. Rather than explicitly rule such action in or out, the resulting Commonwealth Games Act, whether by accident or design, was sufficiently vague for no one to be really sure.
6.G Williams, Generation Zed: No Other Radio Like This, Brisbane, Kingswood 2000, p. 28.
7.J Biafra, Maximumrocknroll, No. 10, 1983. Reprinted online: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cch223/australia/info/dktourreport.html.
8.Aurukun is an Aboriginal settlement on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula, far north Queensland. Title of the land had been given over to Comalco for mining purposes, a company in which the premier’s family and many of his ministers held shares. See E Whitton, The Hillbilly Dictator: Australia’s Police State, Sydney, ABC Books 1989, pp. 19–20.
Chapter 9. Brisbane Blacks
1.R Fitzgerald, From 1915 To The Early 1980s: A History Of Queensland, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press 1984, p. 586.
2.L Woodward, ‘Aboriginal uproar as Tomkins is at it again’, Australian, 15 October 1982, p. 11.
3.Fitzgerald, pp. 528–529.
4.C Walker, Buried Country, Sydney, Pluto Press 2000, pp. 14, 262.
5.ibid. p. 263.
6.See M Aird, Brisbane Blacks, Southport, Keeaira Press 2001, p. 82.
7.Perhaps a conservative estimate: Ross Watson gave a figure of 250 calls for an eight-hour program to Garry Williams (see Generation Zed, p. 55), but in an interview with Judi McCrossin this was revised down to between 120 and 150 per day.
8.Now the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal.
Chapter 10. Too Much Acid
1.E Whitton, The Hillbilly Dictator: Australia’s Police State, Sydney, ABC Books 1989, p. 92.
2.ibid. p. 107. Whitton details the breakdown of Lewis’ corrupt monies as follows: $2221 a week in bribes; $3923 from illegal gaming bosses Vittorio Conte and Geraldo Bellino and $5307 from prostitution identities Anne-Marie Tilley and Hector Hapeta. Having already been refused a knighthood by the Queen in 1982, Lewis’ diaries show several meetings with Bjelke-Petersen confidant Sir Edward Lyons ‘re honours’ before finally receiving a recommendation from the premier in August 1985.
3.ibid. pp. 114–115, 162–163.
Chapter 11. SS Brigade
1.A McGahan, Last Drinks, Sydney, Allen & Unwin 2000, p. 173.
2.Dickie recounts this story in The Road To Fitzgerald And Beyond, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press 1988, pp. 157–161. After watching the move take place, Dickie was followed by police as he cycled home; days later, the house at which he was staying received several threatening phone calls, along with an apparent bullet hole in the front window after a police vehicle had been observed outside the house.
3.E Whitton, The Hillbilly Dictator: Australia’s Police State, Sydney, ABC Books 1989, pp. 121, 124.
4.ibid. pp. 150–151.
5.ibid. p. 130; see also Dickie, pp. 193–194.
6.Bjelke-Petersen received support from his Aboriginal Affairs minister (and now independent MP for the federal seat of Kennedy) Bob Katter Jr, who banned condoms from Aboriginal community stores with the immortal line, ‘Condoms are despicable things that won’t prevent the spread of AIDS but will encourage the community to have sex with gay abandon.’ See Dickie, p. 190.
7.McGahan, p. 1.
8.This letter was reprinted on the back page of Semper, No. 1, 1989 under the title ‘Union Logic’, along with Litster Mann and Ffrench’s blacked-out legal advice to the union executive and Victoria Brazil’s leaked plans for Triple Zed’s eviction.
9.D Porter, ‘Radio station 4ZZZ on campus’, file note, 21 February 1989, p. 1.
10.ibid. pp. 2–3. Porter writes in part: ‘Within an hour of that meeting the director-general of education rang the vice-chancellor, at the request of the minister, urging the vice-chancellor to provide the student union with the written co
nfirmation requested by Ms Brazil. The vice-chancellor spoke to the director-general the following day and explained the background and that a further meeting was to be held later that day.’
11.ibid. p. 1. Porter also writes ‘the university would support the student union in any move to evict 4ZZZ through court action’.
12.S Chen, ‘Victoria rules the campus’, Sun, 13 January 1989, p. 19.
13.One of the union’s more contentious contributions to college life was a special bus service running from the campus colleges to the Royal Exchange and Regatta Hotels in Toowong. See J Phillips, ‘Victoria Brazil states her claim’, Courier-Mail, Monitor, 13 May 1989, pp. 1, 4.
Chapter 12. Cyclone Hits Expo
1.Biafra and Alternative Tentacles were charged under Californian law with distributing ‘harmful matter to minors’ after including a poster by Swiss artist HR Giger (famous for designing the creatures used in the Alien films) in the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist album. The case was dismissed when the jury failed to reach a verdict. Biafra had been a vocal campaigner against the so-called moral majority and, in particular, the activities of the notorious Parents’ Music Resource Centre. Led by the bouffant-haired Tipper Gore, wife of future presidential candidate Al Gore, the PMRC led the crusade against ‘pornographic’ music that eventually led to the introduction of the widespread ‘parental advisory’ system of record labelling. In his singling out of the Dead Kennedys for attention, and by claiming to be acting as a ‘concerned parent’, Pasterkamp’s cues and rhetoric were clearly derived from that used by the PMRC.
2.J Burke, ‘Cassette rocks hearing’, Sun, 15 May 1989, p. 7.
3.D Fardon, Decision By Bench: [Constable]Katarina Ruzh Bosnjak Versus Frank Warwick Vere. Magistrates Court, Brisbane, 16 May 1989, pp. 158–163.
4.P Dickie, The Road To Fitzgerald And Beyond, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press 1988, p. 280.
5.See E Whitton, The Hillbilly Dictator: Australia’s Police State, Sydney, ABC Books 1989, pp. 183–185 for a full account of this legendary exchange.
6.G Roberts, ‘Nat poll promise: a “porno” rock ban’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 November 1989, p. 3. Cooper also wildly predicted a gay Mardi Gras on the Gold Coast should Labor come to office; one of his ministers, Bob Katter Jr, later promised to walk ‘backwards to Bourke’ if there were any gays in his Charters Towers electorate.
Chapter 13. Rock Against Work!
1.J Marx, ‘Parables For Wooden Ears’ (review), Rolling Stone 499 (Australia), August 1994, p. 90.
2.Quoting Marx again, from the above review: ‘“Tail”, for example, is tangled and inert and teeters precariously on the brink of disappearing up its own arsehole . . .’
Chapter 14. Spring Hill Fair
1.Time Off, by then Australia’s longest-running street paper, was established in 1980. After an internal split, Rave was created in 1991. The dance-oriented publication Scene followed in 1993.
2.Cricket had in fact become something of a common bond in the Brisbane scene. Many of the musicians and local industry figures were obsessive followers of the flannel game, with unsung local band Chopper Division founding the Brisband Cricket Competition. Former Time Off editor Simon McKenzie was (literally) the 11th member of the Webfinger XI, comprising members of Powderfinger and Webster: ‘You had [producer] Magoo umpiring while Bernard Fanning bowled his outswingers (with some genuine pace I might add) against Peter Walsh. That was the sort of people who were playing. You might actually get an audience for that these days.’
3.A third Hansen sister, Mary, was a long-serving member of British band Stereolab until her untimely death in a road accident in 2002, aged 36.
4.Bob Ellis relates this encounter in his story for J-Mag, 1994–1995, p. 43.
Chapter 15. Black Ticket Day
1.G Williams, Generation Zed: No Radio Station Like This, Brisbane, Kingswood Press, 2000, p. 39.
2.ibid. pp. 62–63.
3.P Barclay, ‘Queensland: 10 Years After Fitzgerald’, Radio National, 16 May 1999, reprinted online: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s26032.htm
4.J Birmingham, ‘It’s Raining Cops’, Rolling Stone 533 (Australia), March 1997, p. 40 (reprinted in the anthology Off One’s Tits, Vintage, Sydney 2002). Triple Zed put forward this allegation as evidence that the actions by police that night were premeditated. If the riot gear belonged only to the five PSRT initially assigned to cover the event, however, this cannot be sustained.
5.Criminal Justice Commission, Police Behaviour At A Triple Zed Market Day: Report Of An Investigation, Brisbane, 1997, p. xii.
6.ibid. p. viii.
7.M Hele, ‘Military police accused over festival brawl’, Courier-Mail, 21 October 1996, p. 2.
8.Cooper stated at his press conference: ‘We will work together and make sure that we have the arrangements with senior police and the management of 4ZZZ to work together to make sure the next one works well’, quoted by J Baird in 4ZZZ (Media Release), ‘Cooper assures future of 4ZZZ Market Days’, 21 October 1996.
9.Criminal Justice Commission, p. xiv. See also pp. viii–xi, xiii–xiv.
Chapter 16. The Human Jukebox
1.Now the Powerhouse Centre for Live Arts.
2.C Mathieson, The Sell-In, Sydney, Allen & Unwin 2000, p. 196.
3.A Stafford, ‘New Faces: Kiley Gaffney’, Rolling Stone 526 (Australia), September 1996, p. 36.
4.This version was eventually released as I Like Your Old Remix Better Than Your New Remix on Unit’s fourth single (!/Modern Life).
5.A Humphreys, ‘Unit’ (review), Rolling Stone 544 (Australia), January 1998, p. 99.
Chapter 17. New Suburban Fables
1.The Day You Come was nominated for Song of the Year at the 1996 ARIA awards; it also came in at #6 on Triple J’s Hottest 100 listener’s poll for that year.
2.A Stafford, ‘Ben Lee vs the World’, Rolling Stone 560 (Australia), April 1999, pp. 38–39, 110. After calling Lee a ‘precocious little cunt’ in Sydney weekly Revolver, Lee hit back at Fanning in an interview with the author. Rather than retract his remarks, Fanning instead toned them down to ‘smart-arse little wanker’.
3.Oxley was the former seat of former federal Labor leader Bill Hayden, who held the seat from 1961 to 1988 before becoming governor-general. While Fanning may have been lyrically coy in regards to Hanson, the same could not be said of local band Escape From Toytown, whose song The Fish And Chip Bitch From Ipswich was a characteristically blunt denunciation. The song topped Triple Zed’s Hot 100 poll for 1996.
4.In R Yates, ‘Trusty Old Jackets’, Massive, September 2000, at http://www.ozmusic-central.com.au/powderfinger/text/articl31.htm
Chapter 18. Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World
1.A Stafford, ‘Dream Believers’, Rolling Stone 535 (Australia), May 1997, pp. 23–24.
2.See I Shedden, ‘Darren Hayes: Miami sound machine’, Weekend Australian, Review, 9–10 October 2002, pp. 4–6.
3.See for example D Scatena, ‘Pop duo ends on sour note’, Daily Telegraph, 6 October 2001, p. 3 and ‘Solo the loneliest number’, p. 23.
Epilogue – No, Your Product
1.In K Munro, ‘George’, Rolling Stone 576 (Australia), July 2000, p. 30.
2.L Willis, ‘Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Terry Lewis seeking compensation for Fitzgerald Inquiry’, PM, 19 August 2003, reprinted online: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2003/s927935.htm
3.See T Flew et al., Music Industry Development And Brisbane’s Future As A Creative City, Brisbane, BCC/QUT, 2001.
appendix – cast of characters
The author extends his sincere thanks to everyone interviewed for this book:
Bruce Anthon: Drummer of the Survivors and, later, the Credits. Played several early gigs with the Go-Betweens.
Jessica Astrid
(née John Darcey): Promoter of Rock Against Work at Bertie’s Tavern and Metropolis, 1991–1992. Also worked with Peter Walsh on the Livid Festival.
Dave Atkins: Drummer for Pangaea, Elevation, P-Oiler and more. In 1996 he formed the hip hop/dance fusion band Resin Dogs.
Darren Atkinson: Drummer for Ups and Downs.
Greg Atkinson: Singer and bass player in Ups and Downs, and later Big Heavy Stuff.
Chris Bailey: Singer of the Saints. Solo artist.
Jon Baird: Journalist at Triple Zed best known for breaking the infamous Boggo Road story in 1983. Returned to the station (with Jim Beatson) in the early ’90s to help revive the station’s flagging newsroom.
Adine Barton: Editor of BUMS (Brisbane Underground Music Scene) fanzine, 1990–1992. Also served as the manager of Custard during this time.
Tiga Bayles: Radio announcer who began his career at Sydney’s 2SER in 1976. Returned to Brisbane in 1993 to take up a position as the general manager of Aboriginal broadcaster 4AAA.
Jim Beatson: Driving force behind the establishment of Triple Zed. Later the program services manager at the CBAA (Community Broadcasters Association of Australia).
Peter Beattie: The 36th premier of Queensland, serving four terms (1998–2007).
John Birmingham: Journalist and author.
Dave Brown (aka Big Chief Wahooti, or simply The Chief): Manager of Custard, 1992–1996.
Marty Burke: Singer of Razar.
Louise Butt: Journalist at 2SER in Sydney before moving to Brisbane to take up a position at Triple Zed in early 1982. Created the Murri Show with Ross Watson.
Mark ‘Cal’ Callaghan: Singer and guitarist of the Riptides, initially known as the Numbers. Later the leader of GANGgajang.
Kev Carmody: Singer/songwriter and performer.
Jeff Cheverton: Editor of University of Queensland student newspaper Semper Floreat, 1989.
Rod Coe: EMI’s house producer when enlisted to record the Saints’ debut album in early 1977. Also produced numerous recordings by the late Slim Dusty.
Amanda Collinge: Announcer and journalist on Triple Zed, 1983–1985 before moving to Triple J, 1985–1990.
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