REVIEW BY JIM MCILROY
Radical Brisbane: An unruly history
Edited by Raymond Evans & Carole Ferrier
Vulgar Press, Melbourne 2004
329 pages, pb, $50
Available from <http://www.vulgar.com.au>
Radical Brisbane: An unruly history is a timely reminder that Australian cities, and Brisbane in particular, have a history of popular struggles and progressive ideas, sometimes virtually unknown to a modern audience.
Most people until recently have thought of Queensland, and its capital city Brisbane, as the home of the dictatorial, right-wing Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime and the racist One Nation movement launched by Pauline Hanson. But Brisbane experienced the sharpest industrial confrontation in Australian history in the 1890s shearers' strikes, and the first general strike in the country in 1912.
Queensland elected the first Labor Party government in the world in 1899, experienced the longest period of Labor Party administration of any state, and was probably more dominated by the country's most right-wing union, the Australian Workers Union (AWU), than by the National Party, over the whole course of the 20th century.
It shouldn't be forgotten that the electoral gerrymander that Joh Bjelke-Petersen used with such success to entrench his National Party regime was initiated by the Hanlon Labor government specifically to eliminate the country's only ever Communist Party member of parliament, Fred Paterson, in 1950!
Radical Brisbane reminds us of the other side of Brisbane's history: the people's campaigns for justice and social change, the mobilisations in the streets around a variety of issues, even outbreaks of violence and street-fighting, in a city until recently regarded more as a sleepy, overgrown country town, than a bustling, modern metropolis.
"Radical Brisbane mines history from below, without losing sight of the power of capital organised by the state", Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen, an early veteran of the student revolt at University of Queensland in the 1960s, notes in his foreword to the book.
"As we worked on this book", editors Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier observe in their introduction, "we began to realise that it was not so much that nothing had happened of historical worth or note, but rather the opposite: that so much had occurred over a 180-year time-frame that it would be impossible to do it full justice in one volume...
"... [Brisbane] is ... the place of cruel floggings and public executions along Queen Street. It saw the Bread or Blood riots, frontier repressions and concerted anti-Chinese agitation. In its streets, people agitated for civil and democratic rights and in its suburbs, dreamers dreamed of socialist utopias.
"It has hosted wildly conceived affairs like the Pineapple Rebellion and the Battle of Brisbane. During a street clash in 1912 a 73-year-old woman unionist unhorsed the Police Commissioner with her hatpin. In World War I, it was Australia's most disloyal capital and in World War II, its most unruly.
"It has endured sectarian disturbances, larrikin excesses and Australia's first rock'n'roll riot. And all this happened before the better known 'radical times' of the 1960s and 1970s — the struggles against the Vietnam War, military conscription and Apartheid and for women's rights, indigenous rights, gay rights, union rights and the right to march."
The story is told through 50 chapters, by a variety of authors. It begins with the assassination of the brutal Penal Commandant of Moreton Bay prison in 1830 and ends with the struggle for Aboriginal land rights, focused on Musgrave Park.
The chapters are linked to sites, buildings and street addresses, which often today have disappeared under the wrecker's ball or been transformed into quite different usages, in contemporary, commercial, trendy urban Brisbane.
In 1890, the first Women's Union was established in a building near where the statue of one of its founders, labour movement activist and suffragette Emma Miller, now stands, in King George Square. Although it only lasted a short time, collapsing after the defeat of the 1891 shearers' strike, the Brisbane Women's Union broke new ground in organising women workers, employing a woman organiser, and putting the issues faced by women in the workforce directly on the labour movement agenda.
The book describes the militant struggles of the Industrial Workers of the World and other socialists to establish the right to free speech, from 1913 onwards. Another chapter recounts the riot that occurred in July 1917 in the School of Arts building in Ann Street between pro-conscription and anti-conscription women (led by the Women's Peace Army), prior to the second, failed conscription referendum, later that year.
A remarkable section outlines the near civil war crisis that erupted in November 1917 when the federal government under PM Billie Hughes moved to prevent the publication of a special edition of the Queensland Government Gazette, in which Labor Premier T.J. Ryan had read into Hansard the anti-conscription case.
There is the story of the unemployed camps around Brisbane in the 1930s, hotbeds of radical organising by the Communist Party and the Unemployed Workers Union; the progressive theatre and literary groups, and left bookshops, which flourished in Brisbane in the 1930s and later; and the brutal bashing by police of Fred Paterson, following a mass upsurge of unionists in support of striking railway workers.
The remarkable initiative by two Brisbane women in chaining themselves to the bar of the Regatta Hotel, Toowong, to demand the right of women to drink in public bars in March 1965 was an early landmark in the second wave feminist movement in Australia — on a unique Australian issue!
"For more than 60 years, the Communist Party of Australia was an active participant in political, industrial and social struggles in Brisbane. Established in the early 1920s it was easily the most important left-wing body in Queensland — and vastly more influential than any other organisation, albeit with a state-wide membership of only a few thousand.
"For most of its history, the CPA was the only political party willing to fight consistently for a better deal for Brisbane's working class and, despite vociferous opposition from reactionary forces, it helped improve the lives of innumerable workers and their families", the book states.
The story of student activism at the University of Queensland in the 1960s and 1970s is told, from the founding of the New Leftist SDA (Society for Democratic Action) in 1966, to the anti-Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s and the Moratoriums of the early 1970s.
Radical Brisbane recounts the anti-racist protests which greeted the South African Springbok rugby union team which played in Brisbane in July 1971 as part of its Australian tour. This chapter describes how Bjelke-Petersen declared a state of emergency, and Queensland police staged a vicious attack on peaceful anti-apartheid protesters.
This led to the Bjelke-Petersen government's infamous ban on street marches in 1978-79, and the massive upsurge of struggle for the right to march which erupted in the late 1970s. The book outlines these civil liberties protests, and the thousands of arrests which were carried out by the Queensland police.
Radical Brisbane is a revelation in bringing to public attention so many hidden areas of social unrest and struggle over a century and a half of the history of Queensland's capital. While the chapters are not integrated into one narrative, and the whole book therefore appears to lack a central theme at times, the overall content makes it an absorbing and fascinating read.
As Radical Brisbane takes the story only to the end of the 1970s, it is to be hoped the editors have a plan to prepare Volume 2 to continue the history of the city's social struggles up to the present day. As the editors note in their introduction, "We think of it... not as just a book about the rough and tumble of past campaigns, but rather as one of present empowerment in a city and country in much need of regaining its radical heart."
From Green Left Weekly, July 7, 2004.
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