Pig City
December 13th, 2007 by Dan Hill
The companion piece to the aforementioned documentary on the early-’80s Melbourne music scene, this programme paints a vivid picture of Brisbane of the same time (it’s almost an inadvertent companion piece to the Berlin doco Steve posted recently). Known as Pig City, due to insanely right-wing and entirely corrupt administration of state premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and particularly the ‘iron fist wrapped in another iron fist’ approach to community policing, Brisbane generated a rich subculture in response, with bands like The Saints, The Go-Betweens and The Riptides all emerging from an atmosphere where just being in a band was a political act in itself.
I saw a great exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane last year - Taking to the Streets (my photos here) - that collated numerous artifacts illustrating how Brisbane was effectively living under police state conditions from the early-’70s to the early-’80s. The right to protest was removed, enforced by ’special powers’ imbued upon the police; anybody walking down the street with more than 3 people would constitute “a march” and could be arrested. Describing many more, er, imaginative state-led approaches to creating social cohesion in the Queensland of the time, what comes through in this doco is a sense of just how warped a ‘western’ political system can get - only 20 years ago - and yet also the optimistic message that a subcultural scene can emerge to resist this, and ultimately prevail. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of history is long but bends towards justice. With some top tunes along the way, he might have added but didn’t.
The key role of community radio station 4 Triple Z (4zzz) also comes through the first-person accounts in the programme, including from Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison and several University of Queensland alumni, all students at the time and suddenly and inadvertently radicalised by police pressure.
As with most Hindsight shows, it’s hugely atmospheric, including quite unsettling sound recordings from right within the protest marches as police move in on the crowd, and the sound of Brisbane’s architecture being torn apart by the state’s bulldozers. The latter, in particular the much-loved Bellevue hotel being deceitfully pulled down in the dead of night, was something that would eventually unite conservative Brisbane with the protesting counterculture. The final nails in the coffin, somewhat reminiscent of Woodward & Bernstein, were provided by an pioneering ABC TV programme ‘Four Corners’ and associated articles in the Courier Mail newspaper, detailing corruption in the so-called ‘Moonlight State’, and the subsequent Fitzgerald Inquiry that would prove beyond doubt the rampant corruption at the core of the administration, kicking the National Party out of office in Queensland and plonking a few of them in the jails they’d previously reserved for kicking the crap out of Aboriginal people and hairy students.
Another great documentary from Radio National, it only loses one point for failing to include the brilliant Go-Betweens track, ‘Lee Remick’, whose opening lines effortlessly articulate the self-deprecating cultured wit that would’ve so infuriated their conservative fellow citizens of the ‘big country town’ …
She comes from Ireland
She’s very beautiful
I come from Brisbane
I’m quite plain
Despite that omission, there’s some great music in here, and it’s a rich portrayal of a city in turmoil. The gleaming Brisbane of 2007 is now large, diverse, smart, cultured, architecturally innovative, growing fast, and increasingly seen as hip by a Sydney and Melbourne shuffling uncomfortably as they look north. It’s a good time to be reminded of where the city has come from. A fairly incredible story.
April 11th, 2008 at 2:41 am
Lindy Morrison had very little to do with the protests at the time. She had fled Queensland to Sydney in 1978.
June 18th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I was in Brisbane in the nineteen seventies. I remember the brutality vividly.
I was beaten by the police and hospitalized as a consequence, effectively ending my sojourn in the deep north. As the years passed and Bjelke’s grip weakened, I would tell my friends I would throw a party when he lost office, then when he was arraigned I said I would throw a party when he was sent to jail. More years passed and finally he died and someone demanded laughingly said party. My only response was to quietly think to myself that I would throw a party when someone with sufficient authority confirmed that he was safely burning in hell.