Pig City Page 2

  If liberty’s price really is eternal vigilance, our collective amnesia will ensure we see Bjelke-Petersen’s like again.

  – AS

  October 2005

  introduction – know your product

  She comes from Ireland, she’s very beautiful

  I come from Brisbane, and I’m quite plain

  – The Go-Betweens, Lee Remick

  If popular music really is a universal language, it’s curious how easily a song – even a commercially obscure one – can come to symbolise a city’s identity. The stories of London, Liverpool, Manchester, Dunedin, Detroit, Memphis, Nashville, New York, New Orleans, San Francisco and Seattle are inextricably entwined with the music made there. Robert Forster, however, could never have imagined that his self-deprecating paean to an actress would become so fabled in his home town.

  This is understandable. Queensland’s often stifling subtropical capital doesn’t exactly spring to mind when discussing the world’s great musical cities. Partly this comes down to Australian pop and rock’s poor-relation status next to the United States and the United Kingdom. Inside Australia, too, Brisbane for decades wore a provincial reputation as a big country town, at least in the southern capitals of Sydney and Melbourne.

  Of course, one of the most successful bands in recording history began life in Brisbane in the late 1950s. But the Bee Gees didn’t so much outgrow the city as outgrow Australia. Struggling for recognition, the Brothers Gibb began an exodus of musicians out of the country when they left for their native UK at the beginning of 1967, the year before a peanut farmer, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, took control of Queensland’s ruling Country Party (later the National Party).

  The literature on Australian pop is only beginning to accumulate, so again it is understandable that Brisbane, so far, has rated little more than a footnote. The bigger problem is that the footnote has remained the same, recycled in various contexts by various authors: that music in Brisbane – especially the punk scene of the late ’70s – was overwhelmingly a reaction to the repression of the Bjelke-Petersen era.

  This is partly true. Bjelke-Petersen’s rule of Queensland between 1968 and 1987 was nothing if not iron-fisted. Public displays of dissent were often brutally suppressed; the rule of law was routinely bent to the will of those charged with its enforcement; minorities were treated as simply another obstacle on the path to development. To top it all off, the electoral system was hopelessly rigged in favour of the incumbents. ‘Here,’ writes Rod McLeod, ‘in a city practically under police curfew, you fucked and fought, got stoned, got married, or got out of town.’1

  But it makes little sense to give a politician too much credit for the creation of a music scene. Major cultural movements result from an intersection of local, national and international factors. The Saints were not so much a reaction to living in a police state as they were a response to the music of not just the Stooges and the MC5, but the Easybeats and the Missing Links. And it’s doubtful the national success of a string of Brisbane acts in the ’90s – from Powderfinger to George – could have happened without the nationalisation of the Triple J network.

  Of course, it would be naive to suggest that growing up in a climate of fear and loathing did not heavily distort the prism through which these artists saw the world. As Saints guitarist Ed Kuepper says, ‘I think the band was able to develop a more obnoxious demeanour, thanks to our surroundings, than had everyone been really nice.’ In the words of Australian music historian Ian McFarlane, ‘That Australia’s most conservative city should give rise to such a seditious subcultural coterie is a sociological phenomenon yet to be fully explored.’2

  This book is my attempt to document the substantial yet largely unsung contribution that Brisbane has made both to Australian popular culture and to international popular music. In doing so, I aimed to chart the shifts in musical, political and cultural consciousness that have helped shape the city’s history and identity. In its broadest sense, Pig City is the story of how Brisbane grew up.

  Pig City concentrates on the quarter-century from 1975 to 2000. It only touches on the ’60s and early ’70s, by way of explaining the convergence of political and cultural forces that began to exert their pull upon the city at the dawn of the punk movement.

  By the 1980s National Party campaign billboards featured the benign face of the premier accompanied only by the words ‘Joh’ and ‘Queensland’, so synonymous had the two become. Thus, when the government finally fell in 1989, it marked a divorce that could only be read as a metaphor for broader changes. As novelist Andrew McGahan writes in Last Drinks, his fictionalised account of the Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption that eventually resulted in the government’s downfall:

  For 30 years those in government and their friends had, in looking after their own interests, kept Brisbane frozen in time. The city was caught in the perpetual twilight of the 1950s, as though the ’60s and ’70s that had wrought so much havoc around the rest of the world had quietly passed Brisbane by. But it couldn’t have remained frozen that way forever. Even if the Inquiry hadn’t come along and split the state apart, something else would have given somewhere. But because it had all been dammed up and fettered for so long, it meant that when finally the regime did fall, decades of pent-up energy burst forth in a fury. It wasn’t simply a generational change. It was an explosion.3

  As it happened, the state election of 2 December 1989 coincided with the second Livid Festival. Away from the bands, a crowd of punters gathered around a single black and white television to watch as the results poured in. The city’s youth had always reserved a special place in their hearts for the National Party: when it was announced from the main stage that the government had been overthrown, the answering roar was just about the loudest thing heard all day.

  The first Livid Festival, held on 21 January 1989, was a circuit-breaker for Brisbane. Featuring a line-up consisting almost entirely of expatriate Brisbane artists, it emphasised the unusual strength of the connection between the city and its music scene. ‘We had some really great home-grown stuff, and we wanted to bring it all back, put it together and have a best of Brisbane,’ festival producer Peter Walsh says. Queensland is a parochial place, and not just about its football teams.

  Truly universal pop songs, though, may as well come from outer space. Savage Garden, for example, grew up in the city’s working-class southern outskirts, something that had no discernible impact on their sound. Yet when the pop duo played the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Sydney 2000, they were heralded as municipal ambassadors at home. For Darren Hayes, however, playing to a worldwide audience from the biggest stage in the world was simply the fulfilment of a childhood ambition:

  I just know that ever since I was about 12 or 13 I’ve had this vision of standing on a stage in front of about 80,000 people. I sometimes wonder if, when I get there, I’ll actually like it, but it’s necessary. For whatever reason, I have to follow this through to its logical conclusion. I can’t see any other way.4

  In a book of this scope, many worthy performers have inevitably fallen through the cracks. Pig City was never intended to be an encyclopaedia of Brisbane bands. Nevertheless I have tried to give space to those groups who, while not being afforded wider recognition, succeeded in leaving their mark. To have excluded the likes of Razar and the Parameters for the perfectly sound reason that relatively few people even inside Brisbane have ever heard of them would not only have been neglectful of their contributions, it would have been an abrogation of this book’s purpose.

  While history’s light always shines most brightly on the successful and the influential, Pig City at least attempts to place their achievements within the context of their surroundings, and to provide a glimpse into the soul of a town that, for all its banality, unwittingly tilled the soil of its very own rock & roll creation.

  pineapples from the dawn of time

  (1971–1979)


  CHAPTER ONE

  a million people staying low

  The fist made a sound like two footy boots smacking together and the blood spurted and the student went down, and the line of police blue seemed to smile benignly.

  — Pat Burgess1

  When the charge came, it was as unexpected as it was brutal. As the police stormed over Wickham Terrace with batons raised, protesters paused in shock, frozen for an agonised second, caught as their minds instructed their bodies to fight or flee. Many were inexperienced campaigners at their first demonstration.

  Steve Gray was not one of them, though. He’d been here before, been at this very spot the previous evening, when nothing untoward had happened. Restless, he’d been cruising around the scene, cheekily pointing out the undercover officers mingling among the crowd. But now things were serious. With the screaming crowd breaking up all around him, he fled down the hill into the darkness.

  Reaching the bottom of the hill, Gray paused over the steep drop as two friends rushed to join him. Some jumped heedlessly; others turned towards the rocky face and clambered down. Most just slid on their backsides. Small and agile, Gray negotiated the small cliff-face with ease, but one of his friends fell, twisting an ankle. Moving more slowly, they soldiered on towards the brightly lit Roma Street markets.

  Once safely inside the maze of alleyways, the trio relaxed, and began making their way back to the safety of Toowong. Rounding a corner, they almost collided with three heavy, brown-shirted police officers. Quick as a snake, one of them grabbed Gray by the hair. Twisting its length around his wrist, he hoisted his slightly built opponent to eye level.

  ‘Bang. Bang. Bang,’ said the sergeant. ‘If I ever see you at a demonstration again, I’m going to kill you.’

  It’s both an understatement and a cliché to say that Queensland is different. Peter Charlton wrote a book trying to explain why in 1983. He came up with two words: ‘Distance. Climate.’2 It is indeed an enormous state: from the capital, it is nearly a 24-hour drive north to Cairns, even further west to Birdsville. It’s also hot: even Brisbane, in the south-east corner of the state, endures a prolonged summer in which the mercury hovers around 30°C for five months or more. Winter days, if they can be labelled as such, average around 20°C.

  More to the point, as any southern visitor will moan, it’s bloody humid. From September onwards, thick black thunderheads form over the MacPherson and Main Ranges to the south-west before dumping huge amounts of rainfall over the city. With the humidity comes a certain sluggishness, and it’s equally a cliché to observe that isolated cities in warm climates move at a slower pace than elsewhere. While fostering a more casual attitude to clothing and a laid-back demeanour, such places also tend to be conservative, slower to warm to new ideas.

  But Brisbane made an early exception for rock & roll. In February 1958 Buddy Holly played three of his six Australian shows at the Cloudland Ballroom. The same year the Bee Gees arrived in Australia from the Isle of Man and began performing anywhere they were allowed, including the television program Brisbane Tonight. Another teenage guest was one Little Rock Allen, later known as Billy Thorpe. After both the Bee Gees and Thorpe moved on to seek their fortunes elsewhere, the Beatles’ Festival Hall show in June 1964 provided an infinitely bigger jolt to the city’s youth culture.

  For a few short years the doors of the city’s clubs were thrown open to rock & roll bands. The best of them was, unquestionably, the Purple Hearts. Playing a brash, uncompromising brand of R&B – their name was derived not from the war medal but from the uppers favoured by English mods – the band’s tough sound was easily the equal of the early Master’s Apprentices and even Sydney’s Missing Links, whose song Wild About You the Saints would, years later, cover on their debut album.

  But with less than an album’s worth of material released during their entire existence, the Purple Hearts lack the recording history of the few breakout Australian acts of the ’60s. After moving to Melbourne, the band broke up in January 1967, their promise largely stillborn.

  Queensland had been ruled since 1957 by Country Party leader Frank Nicklin, a farmer, teetotaller and Methodist preacher. It was a background shared by many of his colleagues and, indeed, the Labor opposition of the time. Queensland politics was peculiarly rural in outlook, with the Country Party (renamed the National Party in 1973) the dominant conservative coalition partner over the city-based Liberals. Such remains the case today; the reverse, of course, applies in all other Australian states.

  The sharpest illustration of the primacy of the bush in Queensland political life was the infamous gerrymander, introduced not by the Country Party but by Ned Hanlon’s Labor government in 1949. In fact, the term gerrymander was something of a misnomer. A gerrymander represents the drawing of electoral boundaries in a way that serves the interests of the governing party. This certainly took place in Queensland, but it was the malapportionment, which meant that one vote in the west of the state was worth up to three in Brisbane, that was the critical issue.

  The ‘malamander’ was designed to prevent the metropolitan zones, which held the largest number of voters, from dictating political terms to those in the regions. It did more than that: for four decades the malamander ensured the vast, sparsely populated territory west of the Great Dividing Range lorded it over the populous cities. Originally the malamander had advantaged the Labor incumbents it was meant to serve; when the disastrous Labor Party split of 1957 handed government to the Country Party, the situation was reversed.

  After further tweaking the electoral system to their own benefit, the Country/National Party found itself able to secure a majority of seats in parliament even if it polled the lowest percentage of primary votes. Over time, this reduced both the Labor and Liberal parties to virtual irrelevancy and laughing-stock status.

  Having the seat of power lying out beyond the black stump threw up some interesting parliamentary statistics. By the late ’70s the members of the National Party cabinet all shared very similar backgrounds. All were men, hailing from the bush or small country towns. All had worked in the primary industries sector before entering politics. None had undertaken tertiary studies; many, including the premier, had barely progressed beyond primary school. All were married and had raised their children long before the social challenges of the ’60s and ’70s.3

  For much of the 20th century, education in Queensland was chronically neglected. Between 1919 and 1939, the textbooks in the small number of secondary schools remained unchanged; between 1924 and 1952, not a single new high school was built in Brisbane. The men ruling the state were the products of this system and the inheritors of its failings. As Peter Charlton observes, ‘It explains much of the state’s conservatism, suspicion and resistance to change.’4 It also accounts for the nickname given to Queensland by many commentators: the Deep North.

  The anti-intellectualism of the government and the poor education levels of its representatives meant Queensland, and Queenslanders, became a frequent target of ridicule and derision in the south. A former lecturer in education, Rupert Goodman, remarked in 1969:

  The rest of Australia thinks Queensland is a hillbilly state and that we’re an uncultured mob. Frankly there’s a lot of truth in that. You only have to look at most of our politicians and listen to them in debate. Unqualified, unskilled, untrained, and undereducated, many of them repeat themselves, have bad diction, poor language, are unable to think on their feet or get any message across simply or succinctly.5

  For many Queensland voters, however, such bumbling was endearing. When one considers the comet-like rise and fall of Pauline Hanson, whose One Nation party achieved its most spectacular success in the Queensland state election of 1998, it still is. It means the politicians are never too far above their masters. As Andrew McGahan writes:

  Queenslanders were always wary of the more sophisticated types – they liked their representatives to be awkward and stumbling. They mistook
it for honesty. So much so that the Queensland parliament sometimes bordered on a sideshow collection of the ugly, the misshapen and the incoherent.6

  The New Left movement of the late ’60s was galvanised in Queensland by the intertwined issues of the Vietnam War, conscription and civil liberties. Before this time, as historian Ross Fitzgerald points out, public marches were rarely used as tools of political action. After the first conscription demonstrations were held at Monash University in Melbourne in 1965, however, they were to become a regular feature of Queensland life.

  Ed Kuepper (The Saints): There were other things that linked people together in those days [besides music]. Politics was an important area. Australia was still involved in the Vietnam War, so the moratorium marches were a big thing. You’d meet people – they became social events as well as being expressions of political consciousness.

  But to protest in Queensland usually meant committing a crime. Under the Traffic Act, police permits were required to hold meetings, to march along any road, and to carry and display placards. (Placard permits came at the additional fee of $1.) Permits could be refused without reason, although appeals against refusal could be argued before a magistrate.

  On 5 October 1966, 26 people were arrested during an anti-conscription demonstration. Marches had been held in capital cities elsewhere throughout Australia on that day without incident. This set the tone for subsequent events, conjoining the issues of the rights to free speech and free assembly with anti-Vietnam sentiment.

  The radical movement found a natural haven in the sprawling, leafy surrounds of the University of Queensland in the inner western suburb of St Lucia. In 1967 two groups were formed on campus: the Civil Liberties Co-ordinating Committee and the Society for Democratic Action. From these two groups came the nucleus of students that would establish community radio station 4ZZZ in the ’70s.