the very first Australians around
the very first people to be down
and why we fight, is to be recognised
only to be failed by your blind eyes
yes, only to be failed by your blind eyes
– Brisbane Blacks by Mop and the Dropouts
I do not like to hear how backward Queensland is politically. It is a trope handed down from the Bjelke-Petersen era. Political pundits of different persuasions from mainstream (legacy) media often mouthed the misconception thus : “Queensland is the deep north“, “Queensland is the most conservative state in Australia,” they referred to Queensland as the Hillbilly State. Cartoons in The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age would lampoon Queensland politics. Sometimes Brisbane’s own daily The Courier Mail would get in the act. And this was all before Mass Murdoch took over a large slice of the print media in Queensland. So the liberal press was also responsible.
I wish to push back against this populist notion with one example. I am not denying Queensland was an apartheid state even before South Africa and Israel. But it was this very fact that gave birth to the strongest resistance to apartheid.
In the 2026 Stafford election campaign, Lucy O’Brien from the Animal Justice Party has taken up this trope and is quoted by Justice for Palestine Magandjin in the following tile.
While Lucy O’Brien should be applauded for calling out the Queensland Government’s support for the racist apartheid laws contained in the amendments to the Queensland Criminal Code in Fighting Antisemitism and Keeping Guns out of the Hands of Terrorists and Criminals Amendment Bill 2026, I wish to argue that her historical claim is misguided and that the JFP Not Our Laws campaign should be factually rigorous in its opposition to Israel’s apartheid. Neither the candidates nor JFP should fall into historical tropes at the tail end of an anti-apartheid struggle that goes back generations, especially since at least two of the candidates at the bi-election, Jess Lane (Greens) and Liam Parry Qld Socialists) have been involved in the struggle against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The struggle against apartheid in Queensland
Queensland has always shown the strongest resistance to apartheid … this handwritten motion (shown) was voted unanimously by 3,000 students and staff at the University of Queensland to go on strike and set up a tent city for about two weeks in the Great Court in opposition to the racist Springbok tour of 1971! I would further argue that the struggle against the racist Acts by the Black Panther party and radical students led to the formation of the Aboriginal legal service, the medical service, cheap housing and opposition to racist laws. This history is dedicated to King Yippie, Will Steer, (P.O.A.) and his dog ‘Bark’, without whose constant help, encouragement, advice and sheer presence we (the strike at UQ against apartheid) might have succeeded. – Semper Floreat (Vol. 41 No. 11) 1st September 1971
“During the afternoon of Friday July 23rd (1971), 3,000 students and staff of the University of Queensland held a mass meeting in the refectory and decided to go on strike for the duration of the Springbok Tour, and to convert the University into a centre of anti-racist activity and propaganda, as the only reasonable response to the (Springbok) Tour, South African and Australian racism, and the State of Emergency in the face of the denial of even limited rights of protest by the large scale systematic police action of that week, and in particular at the Tower Mill on Thursday night. It was decided also to call on the Trade Unions and other Australian Universities to join the strike. Whatever, the fate of the action decided by the meeting, that vote was a historic one both for this university and for universities in Australia.” – Roger Stuart Strike historian.
At the time there was real tension between the radicals at Queensland’s only university and aboriginal leaders who formed the Black Panther Party in Queensland led by Dennis Walker [QUT was then an institute of technology not a university]. So began the modern struggle against the Acts. The Queensland Aborigines Act and Torres Strait Islanders Act (1971) were restrictive laws that enforced segregation, controlled movement, and managed the lives, wages, and homes of First Nations people in Queensland. These acts authorized the removal of people to reserves, managed by the Director of Native Affairs, Pat Killoran.
I would like to end this discussion with a tribute to Uncle Sam Watson whose grandson is on the Sumud Flotilla against the apartheid blockade of Gaza as I write.
I remember Uncle Sam Watson telling me a story about how he nearly died on the floor of a paddy wagon during the Springbok tour of Brisbane by the apartheid South African football team. I am not sure I have got the chronology exactly right but I do know that Queensland’s Black Panthers, Pastor Don Brady, Dennis Walker, and Sam Watson were conducting an extensive campaign against the Acts. During one of the demonstrations, Sam was arrested and thrown into a paddy wagon with a number of other people one of whom was his auntie who was a trained nurse. Sam told me that he had been put in that special police arm lock that constricts your oesophagus and causes you to pass out because of lack of oxygen. This is what happened to Sam. After a violent arrest and with so little oxygen in his bloodstream there was threat of him having a cardiac arrest on the floor of the paddy wagon. But his good fortune and the quick action of his auntie administering CPR on the floor of the police van saved him.
Ian Curr
12 May 2026