Of course, in the mid ’80s Australian music was ruled by pub rock, and the fact that musicians with higher artistic aspirations were achieving greater recognition overseas than at home was hardly unique to Brisbane artists. This applied not only to the better known likes of Nick Cave and the Triffids, but also those working in what were then marginal musical genres. Dance music, in particular, was viewed as something sung primarily by soap stars. The appearance of Boxcar – who, as a non-touring electronic band, had their greatest successes in America while remaining in Brisbane – was a genuine anomaly.
David Corazza: We were kind of like the ugly pig stuck in the middle. We were viewed with cock-eyed suspicion by a lot of indie bands in Brisbane because we didn’t have street cred. We weren’t playing thrash or indie pop or anything, we were trying to be this electronic band, and they thought we were just this hilarious rip-off of New Order, which I think is grossly unfair in retrospect.
If accusations of plagiarism were inevitable after Boxcar supported New Order on their Australian tour in 1986, they also highlighted a wider ignorance of dance culture in Australia. The band – songwriter and producer-engineer Corazza, singer David Smith, keyboard player Carol Rohde and, later, drummer Crispin Trist and additional keyboardist Brett Mitchell – was as much a product of the increasing availability of music technology locally as it was a response to the breakthroughs in electronic music in Europe and the UK. ‘If we’d been where we were in the late ’70s,’ Corazza says, ‘we couldn’t have done what we did.’
Corazza had assembled a small eight-track recording studio in the city called Music Systems, in the vain hope that the equipment on offer would prove a magnet for aspiring electronic performers in Brisbane. He was at the wrong party, but found in Smith a creative partner who shared an eye for the future. Unfortunately, an electronic group in Brisbane was always going to be a novelty greeted by raised eyebrows at best and bottles at worst, especially during the band’s rare live performances, where Boxcar was unafraid to challenge visual as well as musical expectations.
David Corazza: I look back with a wry smile, because promoters used to put us in places like the [outer suburban] Calamvale Hotel. I was doing front-of-house that night and there must have been 2000 people there, it was pretty packed. There were maybe 100 to 120 Boxcar fans, who were up against the stage waiting for the band to come on, and I was down the back nervously prepping the mixer and making sure everything was OK. And as you can imagine, the night wears on, the beer gets consumed in more copious quantities, and the natives are getting restless. And then the band walks on stage wearing gas masks, and this wave of howls just came up around me.
Picked up by Sydney label Volition, the band’s debut 12-inch single Freemason, released in November 1988, cruised to number eight on the American Billboard dance charts when it was issued in the US by Arista, an extraordinary feat. The band remained almost unknown in Australia, but working in a genre where live work was incidental rather than essential meant that Boxcar had the rare luxury of staying put long after their commercial breakthrough.
In late 1986, shortly before the state election, a Hong Kong businessman dropped by Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s office. He left the premier a donation of $100,000 cash in a brown paper bag. The premier claimed not to remember exactly who the businessman was. Perhaps this was understandable: he later remarked that such gifts were not at all uncommon. After some further refinements to the state’s electoral boundaries, the government won the poll handsomely.3
What happened next can only be put down to a case of acute megalomania and, perhaps, the advancing years of Bjelke-Petersen, by then well into his 70s. Three months after his victory in the state election, he announced that he would stand for a seat in the federal parliament. ‘Joh for Canberra’ quickly became ‘Joh for PM’, the public relations campaign kicked off by the distribution of thousands of bumper stickers through Queensland newspapers.
Exactly how Bjelke-Petersen aimed to achieve his goal remained opaque: he did not resign as premier, nor did he give any indication of his intention to do so. But his fantasy of remaking the country in his own image would prove fatal. As he hit the hustings and his government looked on aghast, a young journalist from the Courier-Mail and an ABC film crew were busy combing the streets of Fortitude Valley. What they found there would turn the state on its head.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ss brigade
I remembered one night seeing a strange man stalking about in the shadows of one of our places. Narrow faced, with square glasses that had eggshell-thin lenses, a man not drinking, not using the women, not gambling – just watching, seeming to observe everything and everyone . . .
Fool. I was so far beyond genuine newspaper work that I couldn’t even spot an investigative journalist when he was jotting down notes right next to me at the bar.
That’s all it took, in the end. The serious elements in the media shook off their 30-year lethargy and almost casually, certainly with no belief that anything serious would happen, they began to report what everyone already knew.
– Andrew McGahan, Last Drinks1
The Courier-Mail had not been known for its vigour in its pursuit of political and police corruption allegations; indeed, it had regularly taken advertisements from establishments euphemistically offering massage and escort services. Following a change in editorship in early 1987, however, journalist Phil Dickie was given enough rope to follow up an earlier piece that had tentatively prised open the lid on police protection of Queensland’s sex industry. It was like lifting a piece of corrugated iron in the forest. Vermin scattered blindly from the sudden burst of light.
Cleverly, Dickie avoided naming potential scapegoats, concentrating instead on exposing a network of illegal vice and gaming so prolific that only corruption or incompetence at the highest level could fail to detect it. On the evening of 22 April, Dickie watched an illegal casino shift its premises from the Roxy on Brunswick Street to Wickham Street around the corner. The move took place in full view of gathered police and amused drivers on the adjoining Alfred Street cab rank.2 Police baldly labelled Dickie’s resulting article a fabrication.
As Dickie continued to build his case, however, the official denials began to look decidedly comical. Police minister and Deputy Premier Bill Gunn, interviewed on A Current Affair by Mike Willesee, was made to look foolish when he refused an invitation to take a filmed tour of the brothels he claimed did not exist.
Willesee later interviewed Bjelke-Petersen, who had already announced he would stand for a House of Representatives seat at the next federal election. After a particularly excruciating response to one question, Willesee paused for a moment. ‘Sir Joh,’ he eventually asked, ‘do you think senility may be affecting you?’
Enormous public interest preceded the ABC’s airing of Four Corners’ The Moonlight State on 11 May. The hour-long documentary spliced Queensland’s Puritan image – of the strict Lutheran premier singing hymns at church in Kingaroy while wife and federal senator Flo played the organ – with scenes of strippers, gambling and red-lit brothel shopfronts. In between, a succession of informants provided the hard data. Following Dickie’s approach, presenter Chris Masters was careful in identifying mainly crime syndicates rather than police, making it obvious that the industry was protected without naming anyone who could be turned into a convenient fall guy.
With Bjelke-Petersen interstate, drumming up support for his doomed Canberra campaign, Bill Gunn was the acting premier. The stolid Gunn was marked by a will matching his artlessness: without consulting his absent superior, he made the remarkable decision to hold an independent inquiry, with the words, ‘A series of police ministers have had these types of allegations hanging over their heads. They are not going to hang over mine.’ When an alarmed Bjelke-Petersen later told him he had ‘a tiger by the tail’, Gunn was unperturbed. ‘I’m not worried about that, Joh,’ he said. ‘It’ll end up eating you, if anything.�
�3
The distracted Bjelke-Petersen was too late. Gunn’s swift reaction to the outpouring of revulsion that greeted The Moonlight State had set the wheels of his promised inquiry moving at a pace no one could contain. Although inquiries had been held previously to appease earlier allegations, all had been buried by tight terms of reference and a dozing mainstream media. The scale and publicity of the new revelations meant that, for the first time, the political damage of suppressing information – at least in Gunn’s mind – outweighed the danger of taking action.
The next six months was the most turbulent period of Queensland’s political history. The appointment of Gerald ‘Tony’ Fitzgerald QC to head the inquiry – and the granting of some critical indemnities from prosecution – ensured that the focus remained not on securing as many convictions as possible, but on pulling the rug out from the whole rotten system. The media and public gorged on the daily diet of increasingly gross revelations. The inquiry took on a life of its own: Fitzgerald’s frequent requests for wider terms of reference were meekly granted, to the point where, in the end, there were virtually no terms of reference at all.4
Two days after leaving on a business trip to the US, Bjelke-Petersen was caught off guard on another front. Capitalising on the disarray in federal coalition ranks, Prime Minister Bob Hawke called an early election. Bjelke-Petersen had already engineered the coalition’s destruction with his Canberra push, declaring that he alone would now lead the National Party. But when Hawke played his ace, Bjelke-Petersen – marooned in, of all places, Disneyland – had not even nominated for a seat, much less resigned his premiership. Labor won the election easily, winning four extra seats in Queensland alone; then opposition leader John Howard’s ambitions were set back a decade, and the Nationals were decimated.
Formal hearings for the Fitzgerald Inquiry began two weeks later. They would continue for another 18 months. In the end, a system that had looked invulnerable unravelled remarkably quickly, as a cornered police force and government turned first upon themselves, then each other. The first witness, Sir Terence Lewis, suggested that the state government – the same one that had based its electoral agenda on law, order and family values – had an unofficial policy of toleration towards prostitution. In fact, this was strictly police policy, and the chain of command was pointing straight to the top.5
The desertions mounted along with the evidence; by September, Lewis’ deputy Graeme Parker had rolled over, pleading for an indemnity and absolution. Days later, the heavily implicated Lewis was suspended from his position, initially on full pay. Two cabinet ministers, Russ Hinze and Don ‘Shady’ Lane, were also adversely named in the inquiry’s hearings.
Bjelke-Petersen had lost control of Queensland’s political agenda and with it his party. Mike Ahern, the relatively youthful health minister, wanted to see the introduction of condom vending machines to counter the spread of HIV/AIDS; Bjelke-Petersen was having nothing of it.6 When university campuses went ahead and installed the vending machines anyway, police were sent on pre-dawn raids to remove them.
This otherwise marginal issue ironically became central to Bjelke-Petersen’s demise. As the Nationals’ fortunes plummeted, Ahern was viewed as the only voice in the party remotely in touch with reality. When Bjelke-Petersen threatened a snap election to bring his enemies to heel in October, the party finally moved against him. His bluff called, the premier backed off, declaring in a press conference that he would resign the following year, allowing him to preside over the forthcoming World Expo and see out his 20th anniversary in office.
The stalling tactic wouldn’t last long. On 23 November, as the inquiry began to engulf one of Bjelke-Petersen’s closest advisors, Sir Edward Lyons, the premier attempted to sack five of his ministers, including Ahern and Gunn, in what both regarded as a transparent attempt to take over the police portfolio and shut down the inquiry. Mayhem ensued. Ahern challenged for and easily won the leadership of the party; Gunn remained as deputy.
Bjelke-Petersen wasn’t finished. Refusing to resign, he locked himself in his office, phoning Buckingham Palace in an attempt to hold onto his job. When the Queen declined to intervene, Bjelke-Petersen then attempted to broker a bizarre deal with the Labor and Liberal parties, which he hoped would see them uphold a motion of confidence in his premiership on the floor of the parliament. When this last, desperate move failed, Bjelke-Petersen buckled. He resigned from parliament on 1 December 1987.
Many years later, Andrew McGahan, writing in the voice of the fictitious composite Marvin McNulty, summed it up this way:
It was a cataclysm. That was the only word for it . . . Like we’d flown too high and challenged the gods. It started out so small, just a whisper, but someone lost their nerve, someone let it slip, and suddenly it was the end.7
The Bjelke-Petersen era – in name at least – was finally over.
While the rest of Queensland emerged from its long slumber, students at the University of Queensland, the traditional hotbed of political agitation, had fallen asleep at the wheel.
Triple Zed was in serious decay, so poor it had been forced to cancel the local newspaper delivery. The station was hit on several fronts: as venues and gig promotions around town dwindled, so too the station’s lifeblood of subscriptions began to dry up. With the station relying on a core group of mostly inexperienced volunteers, it became harder to turn the broadcaster’s fortunes around. David Lennon was one forced to sink or swim.
David Lennon: That last six months before the eviction, there were only a very small handful of us running the station. The main core of staff before then just floated off and never came back, basically.
For more than a decade Triple Zed’s sheer necessity had been enough to justify its existence, and for much of that time the station had repaid its listeners with much more besides. But by 1988, with economic rationalism in the ascendant and the state government on the skids, selling the ‘warm inner glow’ of being part of the station was no longer going to be enough. Triple Zed’s great mistake was of the kind so common to the left: it took its righteousness for granted. While this was understandable in the face of Bjelke-Petersen, it meant that when the inevitable challenge arrived, the station was thoroughly unprepared.
David Lennon: Andy Nehl came up with the idea of the warm inner glow at a radiothon in 1986 and I think that line was used as a cliché ever since. We used to be able to say give us money because we need it and we’re on your side, but it doesn’t work now. You have to show that you’re giving people value for money.
Jim Beatson: There’s a great episode of The Simpsons about community television, where it just shows one person in a room, begging people to give him money. Well, people give money because they like something; they don’t give money because somebody’s jangling a tin.
Triple Zed had another crucial benefactor underwriting its survival: the student union. The close links between the union and station founders in 1975 had resulted in a start-up loan (never expected to be repaid) of $250,000, while the station paid a peppercorn rent of $2 per month for its use of the premises. Ongoing administrative costs were funded by the union too: around $17,000 per year. The dominance of the left in student politics had kept the arrangement cosy long after the union ceased to have any effective representation or influence on the station’s direction.
The first shot across the bows came in March 1988, when a union council meeting refused to approve the station’s quarterly administrative budget. The response was immediate, with hundreds of station supporters picketing the union building in response. But the union president of that year, Dirk Moses, had fingered the station’s weak link: Triple Zed had no formal links to the student body, and its right to ongoing student funds was dubious at best. Sensing danger, the station quickly introduced a campus news program, but the rumblings continued.
Union elections are a colourful annual feature of campus life, engaged in passionately by a small minority of
the most politicised students and studiously ignored by the rest. For weeks the campus is strewn with flyers and graffiti; lectures are invariably preceded by electoral hopefuls stating their case. Previously, the right had never much threatened the left’s control, seemingly content to contain their representation to the traditionally conservative faculties of law, medicine and engineering.
In September 1988, however, a well-drilled and ambitious group led by a 19-year-old medical student and National Party member, Victoria Brazil, was elected under the banner of The Better Alternative. The treasurer was Julian Sheezel, a first-year commerce student and a member of the Liberal Party.
Julian Sheezel: We were motivated to run because of a great frustration with what we saw as waste and mismanagement in the union . . . We formed a team around like-minded people, people who believed that the union should be accountable to its members, people who believed that the union should not be charging excessive fees for its services, and that all money the union did collect should go into student services. We ran on the basis that we believed we represented the average student at the time.
On TBA’s election, Triple Zed’s station coordinator, Gordon Fletcher, wrote to Brazil seeking clarification of the union executive’s plans with respect to the station, following an on-air interview in which she inferred that she would be seeking unspecified changes. Brazil, who had seen the ALP-aligned Moses caricatured as a conservative puppet by the station, replied:
I hasten to add that I am not a right-wing fascist interested only in axing 4ZZZ. My policy has always been that 4ZZZ is a valuable student and community resource. My reservations in supporting the current structure and programming of 4ZZZ are the result of students’ comments . . . With this in mind, I would very much like to discuss our plans and yours for 1989. I look forward to contacting you early in December when we take office.8
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