We post photos here to show a brief history of the University of Queensland Union (UQU) complex. We include here a plea By Jeff Rickertt for support of a campaign to save the UQ Union complex.
– Uncle Jack Davis
‘All we leave are the memories‘ – slogan of Deen brothers demolitions.
Save the UQ Union Complex
Organising Meeting
When: 5.30pm, Thursday 1 November.
Where: Room 09-201 Michie Building, St Lucia campus.
Friends,
You may have heard about the University of Queensland’s plan to demolish the student union complex at St Lucia and replace it with a shiny ‘student hub’ (read shopping mall). The scope of the plan is not limited to the Schonell cinema, which is already the subject of a petition. The shiny arses in the Chancellery want to bulldoze the lot – the refec, the
forum area, the Relax Block, etc, etc.
I don’t need to point out to any of you the historic importance of this site.
But I will anyway.
As many activists and historians have noted, in Australia UQ and Monash led the radical student upsurge of the late 1960s. The student union area at the St Lucia campus served as the hub of this explosion. It’s where student opposition to the Vietnam War and the Lottery of Death coalesced, where tactics and strategy were debated and decided, where students discussed and critiqued the role of the university and formulated radical demands for student-teacher democracy as part of a wider challenge to an insufferable and authoritarian capitalist order. On 5th September 1967 students massed at the site and resolved to assert their civil liberties by marching to the city without a permit. 126 were arrested.
As the Radical Times Archives points out, that day was ‘a turning point in student and State politics, subsequently leading to mass protests against the Vietnam War and the success of the emerging student movement in the decade to follow.‘
Throughout this period the refec and the forum area served as a kind of redoubt where progressives could lick their wounds after being hammered by Bjelke Petersen’s cops.
In July 1971 3000 staff and students met in the refec and decided to strike in response to the Springbok tour and the police riot outside the Tower Mill the night before. As Roger Stuart explained, the strikers decided to ‘convert the University into a centre of anti-racist activity and propaganda, as the only reasonable response to the Tour, South African and Australian racism, and the State of Emergency in the face of the denial of even limited rights of protest…’
The site reprised this role later in the 1970s as a new campaign developed to challenge Bjelke-Petersen’s street march ban.
And let’s not forget 4ZZZ, Brisbane’s only alternative broadcast service, which went to air from the student union complex in 1975.
Outside the refec, meanwhile, Communist bookseller Bill Sutton could be found on most market days running a stall with selected volumes from the People’s Bookshop. For many students, Bill’s stall was their first encounter with the Marxist classics and the Old Left.
In my era as an undergraduate, the 80s, the refec and forum area were buzzing again as we held meetings and forums to support the sacked SEQEB workers and organise protests against the raid on the Greenslopes abortion clinic, the university’s decision to award Bjelke Petersen a doctorate of laws, and the presence on campus of Special Branch cop, Barry (Crock-of-Shit) Kroche.
Around that time Vanessa Redgrave spoke in the Schonell Theatre about justice for the Palestinians. And of course, the refec established a commendable reputation as a music venue, playing host to some great independent bands, most notably The Saints.
We’ve lost Cloudland and Festival Hall. Are we to lose the refec too?
This is our political and cultural heritage, one of Brisbane’s few remaining sites where the existing built environment still matches the settings of political and cultural dissent captured in the photographs, films and written accounts. It’s our monument to the many campaigns waged by students in this State for rights and freedoms. It links today’s struggles to those of the past.
We’ve lost two trades halls and the Wharfies Club, King George Square has been turned into a concrete wasteland, and the buildings in the CBD that were home to The Daily Standard, the Social Democratic Vanguard and the Communist Party have been obliterated or reduced to facades, mere one dimensional backdrops for the sordid theatre of consumer capitalism. We can’t let the student union complex at UQ meet the same fate. If the neoliberals running the university want more private retail opportunities on campus, let them turn the Chancellery into a shopping mall.
I am calling a meeting to gauge interest in a campaign to stop this latest assault on Queensland’s heritage of resistance. I urge you to come along. Current and former UQ students and staff and anyone else wanting to push back are welcome. Spread the word.
When: 5.30pm, Thursday 1 November (2018).
Where: Room 09-201 Michie Building, St Lucia campus.
Jeff Rickertt
15 Oct 2018
Hello All,
I would like to raise with progressive people an important issue namely the UQ Senate’s proposed demolition of the Student Union Complex including the Schonell theatre. The 2018 UQ Masterplan states that the space is to be ‘re-imagined’.
As you may know, prior to community radio 4ZZZ being expelled from campus by a right wing student union, the station was where the bike shop is now, broadcasting using an antenna on top of the Schonell Theatre.
Without this beginning 4ZZZ would not exist. It gave the station a foothold and political credibility that enabled then station manager, Jim Beatson, to negotiate with the old CPA to purchase their building in Barry Parade, Fortitude Valley and to continue to flourish in many different ways.
The local music scene was boosted at 4ZZZ ‘joint efforts’ in the Refec at UQ. Many local bands cut their teeth in that space.
While such spaces still exist and remain under progressive student union management, they can in future be re-purposed for alternative media, original theatre, world cinema, local music and progressive causes. There was a real connection between 4ZZZ and the anti-war and democratic rights movements that grew up in the old forum area at UQ.
Once that space is gone and the student union relinquishes control over whatever replaces it, we have lost a significant resource for good.
That outcome is not in the interests of independent media or any community project in Brisbane.
We need to hang onto every democratic space we can, campus spaces in particular.
I therefore encourage those who can to attend an organising meeting this Thursday at 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM at Room 09-201 Michie Building, St Lucia Campus to work out how to save the student Union Complex currently under threat.
This organising meeting has been called by Jeff Rickertt who works at the Uni and is a published local historian.
Facebook event is at https://www.facebook.com/events/185488912337623/
Please let others know.
Friends,
The ‘consultation’ period for UQ’s campus development plan closes on Friday 2 November – this week! This is far from the end of the matter, of course, but it is an opportunity to let UQ know what you think about their proposal to demolish the Student Union Complex.
Have your say and encourage your friends to do the same – https://about.uq.edu.au/site-development-plan.
More importantly, get along to the organising meeting on Thursday – https://www.facebook.com/events/185488912337623/.
Jeff
https://www.facebook.com/wbt2006/posts/1126982487467155