‘OPERATION SATOUR’: The 1971 Springbok Tour of Queensland

Mark is Professor of History and ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at Griffith University, where he works in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security. He has written widely on policing, punishment and criminal justice history in Australia and Ireland. His recent books include (with Heather Douglas) Indigenous Crime and Settler Law: White Sovereignty after Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and JV Barry: A Life (UNSW Press, 2007), a biography of one of Australia’s founding civil libertarians. He migrated to Queensland during the last of the Joh years, was a founding member of the Prisoners Legal Service and was one of the litigants seeking to stop the destruction of Special Branch records in 1989.

Cliff joined the Queensland Police Service as a cadet on 8 June 1964 and was inducted as a Constable in 1967. He then served in General Duties for five years. In 1971, he was a Constable First Class stationed at Mitchelton. He was part of the large police team assembled to control expected demonstrations during the Springbok Tour. Cliff was on duty at the Tower Mill on the night of the major protest incident at that venue. He recalls there was a large contingent of country police who were still in the old khaki uniform, whereas most Brisbane police were in the newer blue uniform. He has his own recollections of protestors being moved by police, of pursuits through parks, and of arrests being made. Cliff then joined the Brisbane CIB in 1972 and began studying law in 1978. His QPS role was than as a prosecutor until the Fitzgerald Inquiry in 1987. He worked at HQ assisting the Inquiry until 1989, and then on the Fitzgerald Inquiry Recommendations Implementation Unit. He was promoted to Detective Superintendent at the Fraud Squad and then served at Metro North Region. He was promoted to Chief Superintendent at Rockhampton. He was transferred back to Ethical Standards Command and retired in December 2003. He then commenced at QUT Justice School as a sessional academic, and then moved to the Law School. He occasionally practises at the private bar in criminal law.

Barry is a MPhil student at Griffith’s School of Humanities; supervised by Professor Mark Finnane and Assoc Professor Stephen Stockwell. Barry was born in Kingaroy the week Johannes Bjelke-Petersen first entered state parliament, and he later served in South Vietnam in 1969/70. He then joined the Queensland Police Service, retiring as an Inspector in July 2002. During his police service he served as a detective in the Special Branch from 1978 until 1987, when he was seconded to the Fitzgerald Inquiry (1987/89) and then the Criminal Justice Commission (1989/99). He holds a BA (Govt/Govt) and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Queensland. Having retired to his home town, he is now a part time/remote post grad student. Barry’s dissertation topic is, “The Queensland Police Special Branch 1948 to 1989: History, function and impact’. He advises that the Queensland Police Special Branch file generated for the 1971 Springbok Tour was ‘5K.236′. He will preface his address by explaining how the rogue detective “Barry’ (who features in The Tower Mill – below) could not possibly be him.

THE STORY: Susan Kinnane leaves school in 1968, eager to embrace university and the new freedoms opening up for young women. Her mother has other ideas, however, and when Susan becomes pregnant a struggle for her future sets them at loggerheads. The child’s father, a student radical named Terry Stoddard, has been disabled during an anti-apartheid protest near the Tower Mill, and desperate to escape the deadening hand of her family, Susan opts for marriage to a former beau, Mike Riley.

She does her best as wife and mother, but Mike is as conventional in his way as Susan’s mother and, most unsettling of all, she knows that little Tom would never have been born if things had been different. The marriage endures until Susan’s unhappiness is made unbearable by shocking revelations about the injuries that disabled Terry Stoddard. Already acutely sensitive to the political climate, Susan finds it impossible to live in the Queensland of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a state she now holds responsible for the fate of her lover, and after a visit to Sydney she refuses to return. But Mike has Tom and he loves the boy as though he were his own flesh and blood. Doubting her own motherhood, Susan makes a new life for herself, alone. Freed in this way, she becomes a prominent journalist and for ten years sees little of her son. Then an enquiry into police corruption draws her back. Those who drove her from Queensland are being called to court – but so is Susan for her own choices. How does a mother explain to her son that it was politics that made her give him up? Is it even true? And what does Tom make of his mother now that he is a young man?

THE AUTHOR: James Moloney is one of Australia’s most respected writers for children and young adults with titles such as A Bridge to Wiseman’s Cove and The Book of Lies. Raised in Brisbane, he came to political consciousness amid the controversies of the 1970s and 80s, which he uses in The Tower Mill as the backdrop for a story about a mother and son whose lives are profoundly influenced by those times.