We post this interesting article from community radio 4zzz magazine from 2017 about the purchase of the Communist Party building in Fortitude Valley. – Ian Curr Editor 9 July 2024.
An odd smell wafted through the upper floor of the three-storey brick building. Something was burning. One of the seven people meeting that Thursday night figured he’d investigate; the offices, bookstore and printing room downstairs were an obvious concern.
Then the bomb went off.
Placed near the entrance to the building one floor below, sixteen sticks of gelignite lifted the floor above and blew out nearby walls and doors. Roofing iron and filing cabinets were twisted and torn, crockery in the top-floor cupboards shattered like the windows overlooking St. Paul’s Terrace. The shockwave expanded through the upper-floor, past those gathered at the table, finding little resistance from the louvres at the Barry Parade end. Smoke hung throughout the building. Nobody was injured. A literary confetti made of publications stocked by the People’s Bookshop, which shared the building, settled on the lower floor.
Soon after, somebody identifying as the bomber called in to either the police station or The Courier Mail — accounts from the time vary. “We will bomb more on Friday if they march in the Moratorium,” they warned.
“We tried not to hurt anyone tonight. It’s Hitler’s birthday tomorrow. Heil Hitler.”
It was April 19, 1972.
The far right bombed the Communist Party building in Brisbane, Magan-djin
Shots would be fired into a Maoist-run bookstore on Elizabeth Street later that night. The following day, more anonymous calls were made, this time to Communist Party members. They were told their homes would be next.
This bombing, unlike a firebombing of the same Communist Party of Australia headquarters 5 years earlier, was not covered by insurance. Repair costs were estimated to be at least $3000 — $28 000 today—and a national call-out was made to help rebuild. Money flowed in; the lead suspect flew out. He was arrested interstate, extradited, and later acquitted.
The Communist Party of Australia, or CPA, had moved from it’s previous long-term home into the building on St. Paul’s Terrace in 1964 and over three years converted the building from a “dirty brick shell” into two floors of offices and a meeting hall. Though suffering a decline from it’s zenith of the 1930s-1950s, the CPA was still deeply embedded in the state.
The period that followed was, much like the ones that preceded it, rife with political tension. Queensland was no exception. Two women chained themselves to the Regatta Hotel bar in one of the early actions of second wave women’s liberation, before being marched out by a Licensing Branch officer who would later provide information to the Fitzgerald Inquiry under immunity — he had admitted to accepting around $3 million in bribes. People burned Vietnam draft-cards on the corner of Queen and Albert streets and staged sit-ins under extreme police pressure; others confronted the touring Springbok rugby team as a symbol of apartheid.
The CPA headquarters were bombed. Left-wing bookshops were targeted.
Special branch officers regularly surveilled those with supposedly radical ties. The CPA headquarters at 291 St. Paul’s Terrace were of particular interest. Those who frequented the building generally behaved well for the prying eyes and ears.
In 1968, with The Courier Mail the only daily newspaper, Brisbane was already a one paper town and physical forms of protest were not the only ones being suppressed.
In an attempt to introduce an alternative voice the growing student movement launched a newspaper called Brisbane Line, printed on the well-used press at the CPA headquarters; Jim Beatson, who would go on to become a founding member of 4ZZZ Radio, was one of the press operators. However, as newsagents refused to sell the paper, it had to be sold on the streets, the same streets where the distribution of leaflets then required police permission. It lasted three issues.
FOCO, a short-lived Sunday night staple at the Trades Hall featuring bands, poetry, films and public forums — born of elements from the union and student movements and railed against by politicians and police — exploded, then faded, around the same time. HARPO, another group driven by young people looking to a cultural and political alternative would follow. So, too, would Joh.
By the time 4ZZZ first went to air from its University of Queensland studios in 1975, Brisbane was still a big town — a big town made smaller still if you were trying to carve out a space for something different. It wasn’t long before the station was painted as a radical organising tool, facing off against a state government willing and able to break up political events with surprising violence and, later, a Young Liberal/National UQ Union executive able to drive it from the home it had built.
After leasing a Toowong office block for 3 years, 4ZZZ was looking for something more stable, more affordable. The station needed a floor space between 250 and 300 m2, roof access and right of antennae installation, a location preferably within West End, New Farm or Fortitude Valley with line of sight to the broadcast tower on Mt Coot-tha, plus a kitchen and toilets; it did not need however, “nor do we want, A-Grade office space.” Plans were drawn up and an offer made for a property at 109 Albert Street. It never went further.
In 1991, as the remains of the Australian Communist Party dissolved along with the Soviet Union, the party was looking to sell its assets; 4ZZZ, having run in close circles with members of the party and establishing itself as a group that could be relied upon to have the interests of the community at heart, was considered a worthy beneficiary. It was assumed 4ZZZ could find the money.
“Station workers buy the building,” The Courier Mail reported two years later.
That dirty brick shell repurposed again.
Matt Dennien
17 Sept 2017
Line of Sight in 4ZZZ Radio Times
Knight, A., ‘Radical Media in the Deep North: The Origins of 4ZZZ-FM’, Queensland Review, vol. 14, issue 1, 2007
Lloyd, N., ‘Communist Party Bombing, 1972: 291 St Paul’s terrace’, in Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History, ed. Evans, Ferrier, Vulgar Press, 2004