CONFERENCE REPORT

Radical Times: Brisbane in the Sixties and Seventies

Drew Cottle

Radical Times: Brisbane in the Sixties and Seventies: a Conference on Social Protest Movements and the Labour Movement, 7–8 September 2002, University of Queensland, St Lucia.

This conference organised by the fledgling Brisbane Labour History Association with the assistance of the Queensland Council of Unions was long overdue. If its organisers were inspired by the apparent success of the earlier Sydney Labour History Conference, which traversed similar themes and issues, the Brisbane show emphasised how different its historical context and political experiences were. The conference participants did not engage in amnesiac nostalgia for radical times past. Instead, they offered analyses and testimonies of how radical their social movements were within the confines of the big country town of Brisbane where racism, political repression, and social conservatism held sway.	1
Only Dan O'Neill spoke briefly but incisively about the roots of Brisbane's sunny oppressiveness and its reaction to the first stirrings of political engagement by a moderate minority of university students to the American war in Vietnam, military conscription, institutional and casual racism, South African apartheid, sexism and women's liberation. The jack-boot tradition of Bjelke-Petersen's police force to any manifestation of a student political rally, march or demonstration deepened their political radicalism and swelled their numbers. Unlike Sydney or Melbourne during the same period, there were few Queensland trade union leaders and rank-and-file unionists who actively supported the student struggles. This point was emphasised by the 'southerner,' Alan Anderson who was a Plumber's Union delegate to the Brisbane Trades and Labour Council. 'Ando' stressed that most ALP union officials were either indifferent or openly hostile to the emerging civil liberties movement, led by the St Lucia students. The few Communist Party union leaders may have been personally sympathetic to the students, but never attempted to agitate for these causes as Jack Mundey and Norm Gallagher had done on Sydney and Melbourne BLF building sites.	2
Nevertheless, Left trade union leaders, through Anderson's encouragement, allowed the student radicals to establish 'Foco' within the portals of Brisbane's Trade Hall. 'Foco' became, for a time, a weekly gathering for the alienated young. Rock music, underground posters, and the subversive ideas of the New Left found a willing 'Foco' audience. If some of Australia's best rock bands played their first gig at the Brisbane Trades Hall, many 'Focoists' became radical activists against war, racism and poverty. Only when 'Foco' was forced to vacate its union bastion because of exaggerated complaints about noise and refuse did the police raid and close down every other venue in Brisbane hired by the 'Foco' organisers.	3
The Springbok tour of Australia forged a temporary alliance between Brisbane's middle-class anti-racists and its workers' movement. As Greg Mallory explained, the black bans of the wharfies, seamen, and building workers, alongside the mass demonstrations against South Africa's rugby emissaries of apartheid, caused Bjelke-Petersen to declare a state of emergency and, paradoxically, strengthen the anti-racist struggle throughout Queensland. This latter point was taken up by the long-time black activists, Sam Watson and Bob Anderson. Their memories of systematic police repression against black people, often over invented misdemeanours, confirmed that the Queensland social order was underpinned by its own form of unwritten and unspoken apartheid. It was testimony to the strength and determination of black men and women to resist the State violence and fight for their rights.	4
Throughout the proceedings, the longevity and banality of the Bjelke-Petersen era was constantly recalled. It was not that Jo was the bane of Brisbane radicalism. Rather, the stultifying political and social conservatism maintained by the Bjelke-Petersen regime for such a long period either deepened the radical spirit or broke it. Many of the student radicals in the late 1960s were spied upon by Special Branch with the assistance of the university administrators. When they graduated (if they were not expelled), they found themselves black-listed from employment both in the state public service and major corporations. This aspect of the secret political police in the sunshine state was factually exposed by Greg Mallory.	5
Without significant trade union support, the Brisbane radicals of the late 1960s and 1970s helped to organise women's refuges, rape crisis centres, the Aboriginal legal and medical centres, Brisbane community radio and community newspapers, the peace movement, and ecology groups. Unlike their 'southern cousins,' radicals in Jo's deep north were not drawn into the ranks of the ALP, the Communist Party, the Maoists, or various Trotskyist groups. Overall, they tended to remain, in temperament and action, libertarian anarchists, as Brian Laver, its living embodiment, concluded. They espoused self-management and for a time within the confines of St Lucia attempted to practice it.	6
Fortunately, most of the contributions to the conference were tape-recorded. Hopefully, if the Brisbane Labour History Association can transcribe these offerings, they must be published in the future.	7

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