In 1971, I went on strike with 3,000 other students and staff at the University of Queensland. The strike was against the government’s support for apartheid South Africa. On Thursday the 22nd of July 1971 police charged demonstrators outside the Tower Mill hotel which hospitalized some. Police invaded the Trades and Labor Council building. At a meeting on the following morning, 3,000 people in the Queensland University Union refectory voted to go on strike to oppose apartheid.
The Trades and Labor Council called for a statewide stoppage. And there was a demonstration in Roma street forum now called Emma Miller place. The reason for this was the Springboks rugby union team was in Brisbane at the Tower Mill motel to play some games of football with a team that excluded black South Africans. The team was a racist apartheid team supported by the South African government.
Fifty (50) years later, the South African government took a case against apartheid Israel to try to stop the genocide in Gaza. The case went before the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The court has just handed down its provisional rulings. That ruling is essentially that Israel must stop the genocide (in Gaza). The court did not call for a ceasefire, but nevertheless, a lot of people will take heed of the ruling and try to enforce it. The court has no power of enforcement and it is left to the people of the world to attempt to do so. Now I’d like to have a look at an article called Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire by Susan Neiman It was published in the New York Review of Books and I like to read out that article. it bears witness to what has happened in another state, which has a racist parts past, that is Germany.
Images
1. Tower Mill July 1971.
2. Tower Mill July 1971.
3. Racist police charge demonstrators at Tower Mill July 1971.
4. Anti-apartheid movement at Tower Mill July 1971.
5. Gough Whitlam with members of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972.
6. Aboriginal and Palestinian flags in West End in Magandjin 2024.
7. Poster from anti-apartheid movement.