Once upon a time an academic said to me: ‘In thirty years people will wonder what happened in Queensland in the seventies. It will all sound like a fairy tale — a man ruling with 19 per cent of the vote, a state politician whose manoeuvres removed a federal government. — Hugh Lunn
I received the following question from a political activist about a poster (below) depicting part of the democratic rights struggle in Queensland: “I’m sure you know of those old preserved posters underneath the Priestley Building at UQ (the ones that had been protected behind some old phone booths for years). The poster on the left, the one with Joh on it – do you reckon you might know what year it is from? And even better, anything about that particular protest?”
The poster in question is the one saying (partly obscured) Rally for Change in King George Square at 4:30 pm on 18 July.
There are a number of posters on the billboard at the Priestly building. As requested I will concentrate on the poster advertising a Rally for Change at King George Square. This was not a poster during the Street Marches (1977 – 1979) which was an intense period of mass demonstrations after the Queensland government banned street marches. In the following decade there was another intense period of struggle, the SEQEB dispute from (1985 to 1986). Together, these make up the struggle for democratic rights in Queensland.
The poster was calling for a rally on Saturday, 18th July 1987. I am speculating but this rally was called because the Fitzgerald inquiry had just been started after an ABC Four Corners show, The Moonlight State, alleged corrupt police operating in the Fortitude Valley area, a sleazy part of town then, as it is now.
If you look closely at the poster you’ll see that it depicts the eighth Bjelke-Peterson cabinet (Dec 1986 – Nov 1987) which includes Don Lane who defected from the Liberal Party to the Nationals in 1980. He did so in order to obtain a ministerial position in Transport. Lane was a former special branch officer known as ‘Shady Lane‘ who had become the state member for Merthyr which covered the Fortitude Valley area.
If you look closely at the poster it depicts a number of key characters involved in political repression. From the left you can see future police commissioner, Ron Redmond, assisting in the arrest of an anti-uranium demonstrator on 22 October 1977. 418 people were arrested on that day in the ‘valley of death,’ below King George Square.
Beside that image you can see part of the 1987 cabinet of the Bjelke-Peterson government (see full cabinet below). The poster has an image of a bulldozer knocking down rainforest. At that time anti-logging groups were having some success in stopping logging in rainforest just over the NSW border at Terania Creek. These protests, began in 1979, forced the premier of New South Wales, Neville Wran, to stop logging in the hinterland behind Byron Bay. People placed themselves between the bulldozers and the forest.
Detective Ron Redmond later became the police commissioner after Terry Lewis was stood down for corruption. The demonstration was of the largest mass arrest in defiance of a government in the history of Australia, an anti-uranium rally on 22 October 1977.
The Eight Cabinet of Joh Bjelke-Petersen
Second row: Lin Powell, Ivan Gibbs, Bill Glasson, (until 25 November 1987), Vince Lester, Neville Harper, Geoff Muntz,
Russ Hinze, Martin Tenni,
Back Row: Don Neal, Bob Katter, Paul Clauson, Mike Ahern, BAgrSc, (until 25 November 1987)
During the eighth cabinet of Bjelke-Petersen the Fitzgerald inquiry was called to look into police corruption. On 11 May 1987, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Four Corners” programme telecast the “Moonlight State”, a television documentary compiled by an investigative journalist, Chris Masters. Events which had been filmed raised the possibility that the Police Force was lying or incompetent or both.
At the time Joh was away in London and the original terms of reference for the Fitzgerald inquiry provided by acting-premier, Bill Gunn, were very limited.
“The original terms of reference were issued on 26 May (1987) by special Gazette, empowering Fitzgerald to ‘make a full and careful inquiry’ into the activities of the alleged crime bosses: the Bellino family (Gerald, Antonio and Vincenzo), Vittorio Conte and Hector Hapeta; to investigate whether these people were involved in operating prostitution, unlawful gambling or illegal drugs; to investigate whether police had been guilty of misconduct or violation of duty in policing such activities; and to investigate whether any person on behalf of any of the alleged crime bosses directly or indirectly provided benefit (financial or otherwise) to any member of the police force.” – The implosion of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, 1983–1987 in ‘The Ayes Have It: The history of the Queensland Parliament, 1957–1989 ‘ by John Wanna, and Tracey Arklay.
When Labor’s Wayne Goss became Queensland premier in 1989, he paid special tribute to the role of Tony Fitzgerald, the Commissioner whose inquiry had exposed corruption and maladministration within the National Party government and decisively swung electoral support to Labor. Yet Fitzgerald was constrained by his frame of reference. Historian Jeff Rickertt points to the failings of this approach.
A difficult struggle
The struggle for democratic rights in Queensland was a very long and patchy struggle from the Big March in 1967, to the 1977-79 street march campaign, and onwards to the SEQEB dispute. The latter was about the right to organise in trade unions that had rejected contract labour in the electricity industry.
The poster calls for change but to achieve reform is very difficult under capitalism. The right to organise was constantly under attack and people trying to get on with their lives had little time for organised opposition to the Bjelke-Petersen government. Along the way many organisations were built, but did not last when the task became too hard. For example, it was very difficult to sustain the Civil Liberties Coordinating Committee (CLCC) which organised the longest period of mass defiance of a government in Australian history (1977 to 1979).
The CLCC was replaced by the Civil Liberties Campaign Group led by Senator George Georges. After the government relaxed the ban on street marches in 1979, organisation fell away until 1985 when 1,002 SEQEB workers were sacked during a state of emergency. After the unions were defeated by Bjelke-Peterson, once again there was a period of inactivity until the Fitzgerald inquiry was called to look into police corruption. About this time a group seeking a change in the electoral laws organised some rallies demanding one vote-one-value. I think that this poster is part of that campaign. It was the accumulated years of action that led to the election of the Labor government in 1989.
Movements came and went: the Anti-Vietnam War movement (1966-1972), the civil liberties struggle against the street march ban (1967), the Occupation of the Citizens Military Forces (CMF) building (1970), the Quang Incident (1970), the anti-apartheid strike at UQ (1971), the Smash the Acts campaign (1972 onwards), the Democratic Rights campaign (1977-1979), the opposition to the Senate conferring of an honorary doctorate of laws on Bjelke-Petersen after he sacked 1001 SEQEB Workers (1985), the attempted eviction of 4ZZZ by the UQ Student Union in 1988.
I’m not sure this answers the question but it does give some insight into the rocky road to change. Change is not possible without organisation and it is this that has been lost.
For the poster to persist, lasting from 1987 till 2023, some 36 years, is quite an achievement for something quite so ephemeral. The author did not bother to include a year in the date. I remember in 1977 the CLCC postered most of Brisbane advertising to rally and march in defiance of the government. Posters like March on December 3 (1977) and Joh Must Go could still be seen on electricity poles and other public surfaces even after the demise of the Bjelke-Peterson government in 1989. Repeated attempts had been made by Brisbane City Council and contracting staff to remove these posters. The reason so many posters persisted was that in one night we would put up over 1000 posters and we used a particular kind of glue, called Grasp Ball Glue which made the poster extremely difficult to remove.
Ian Curr
4 July 2023
Note: The other poster on the Priestley building wall is that of call for support for democratic rights in the Philippines as the dictator Marcos had just been deposed and replaced by Cory Aquino.