Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  After initially ruling that Vere had a prima facie case to answer (despite the fact that the recordings under discussion were readily available in most other major chain stores, none of which had received the attention of the Licensing Branch), Fardon set aside three days in May for the case. The hearings were predictably surreal. Prosecuting Sergeant Geoff Cartner opened proceedings by playing a cassette of Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death to the courtroom. He assured the magistrate he would only need to listen to the first side to get the effect.

  ‘I’m very grateful,’ Fardon replied.

  After patiently sitting through Too Drunk To Fuck, Fardon complained of the ‘dreadful’ and ‘garbled’ sound, but agreed he could detect the word that was the subject of the charge.2 From that point, the case rested almost entirely on whether or not ‘fuck’ could still be regarded as obscene to the average Queenslander.

  Warwick Vere: Fortunately I was privy to some good advice. I had a QC living next door, [the late] Shane Herbert, and we basically had to prove that community standards had changed. We gave evidence that the word ‘fuck’ had long ceased to shock and amaze people, and that in fact it occurred 17 times in the Academy Award-winning film of that year, which was Rain Man. It occurred in a book for 12-year-old kids that had been named children’s book of the year! The prosecution tried to make out that tracks like I Kill Children were just unbelievably outrageous; they seemed to miss the irony of what the song was all about. We compared it to the Jonathan Swift essay ‘A Modest Proposal’, where he describes how to cook up an Irish baby for the delectation of the English table. But that was all lost on them.

  In the end, however, the crusty old magistrate was painted into a corner. After a painfully wordy preamble, Fardon eventually turned his attention to the matter at hand:

  The titles of these songs are I Kill Children and Too Drunk To Fuck. The latter song repeats those same words monotonously, over and over, concluding with a sound I think intended to imitate vomiting. If the defendant is to be believed, there is a considerable market for these items and that is an interesting comment, but not unexpected, upon the taste of the general community . . .

  The use of the word ‘fuck’ or its derivatives is quite common . . . I am well aware that amongst men in men-only situations its use is such that it is quite a common word, sometimes it amounts to every second word, and little or no objection seems to arise to it. It may well be the same at women’s-only gatherings, but I don’t know about that . . .

  In this community today, I think the word itself has well and truly ceased to shock or alarm even the tenderest of feelings if it is used with some circumspection . . . The community in general could not care less if Joe Blow bought one or all of these things and took them home. It would be dramatically different if Joe Blow then turned up the volume of his player to the extent that all his neighbours for a hundred yards in all directions could hear the delightful strains of Too Drunk To Fuck. There would be an immediate outcry, and not just about the noise . . .

  On the balance I come to the conclusion that merely selling these things, all of them, or having them for sale without public performance and without undue public display, is not something which is offensive to current community standards. Both complaints are dismissed . . . 3

  The delivery of Tony Fitzgerald’s report on 3 July 1989 saw the government’s final descent from crisis into collapse. True to his inquiry’s intentions, Fitzgerald focused not on apportioning blame but on rebuilding public institutions in a way that would protect the state from again falling into the hands of a criminal and political elite. His most central recommendation to this effect – the abolition of the perverted electoral system that had entrenched the Nationals in power – drove a stake through the heart of the government, by then facing a resurgent Labor led by former lawyer Wayne Goss. Fitzgerald wrote:

  A government in our political system which achieves office by means other than free and fair elections lacks legitimate political authority over that system. This must affect the ability of parliament to play its proper role in a way referred to in this report . . . The institutional culture of public administration risks degeneration if, for any reason, a government’s activities ceased to be moderated by concern at the possibility of losing power.4

  But the National Party had lost the stomach for Ahern’s ‘lock, stock and barrel’ approach to reform. Perceived as weak and indecisive by a party used to authoritarianism, he was ousted two months later by his police minister, Russell Cooper. In just his second term of office, Cooper was a National in the orthodox mould, a conservative grazier and grain-grower, attractive to the party’s old guard. His first day in office was hardly promising.

  As the final witness to appear before the Fitzgerald Inquiry, Joh Bjelke-Petersen had been quizzed about his knowledge of the conventions of parliamentary democracy. Asked what he understood by the doctrine of the separation of powers – which provides that the various arms of authority (that is, the executive, the parliament, and the enforcement arms, including the judiciary and police) be kept separate, in order to avoid the potential for tyranny – Bjelke-Petersen was stumped. After lengthy attempts to evade the question, he eventually managed, amid laughter: ‘Well, you tell me, and I’ll tell you whether you’re right or not. Why – don’t you know?’5

  Just 10 months later, Russell Cooper accepted an invitation to appear on the ABC’s 7.30 Report on the day of his promotion. Host Quentin Dempster’s first question hit the new premier flush between the eyes.

  Dempster: What do you understand by the doctrine of the separation of powers under the Westminster system?

  Cooper: Is this a trick question, Quentin?

  An election, employing the existing electoral boundaries, was announced weeks later. Queensland would go to the polls on 2 December. Cooper, with no time to prepare an agenda of his own, relied on a flamboyant scare campaign. Television advertisements depicted a curtain of blood descending over the screen: such was to be Queensland’s fate should it elect a Labor government. Cooper claimed the state would be overrun by drug-pushers, gays and lesbians. Undeterred by the ruling in the Rocking Horse case, Cooper also promised that ‘pornographic’ rock music would be made subject to the state’s censorship laws.6

  In a marvellous quirk of history, the election date coincided with the holding of the second Livid Festival. This time the venue was the RNA showgrounds in Bowen Hills, the same venue where, 18 years earlier, a South African football team had taken the field under police protection.

  Peter Walsh: The election date was announced after we announced ours, and we subsequently advertised that we would have a wall of TVs so you could watch the results come in. Five minutes before we opened someone said, ‘Peter, where are the TVs?’

  So I went, oops, and I ran home and I got my 12-inch portable black and white. It must have been a record for the most people watching a portable black and white TV! I got up on stage half an hour before Wayne Goss claimed victory for the Labor Party, and announced that the National Party had been kicked out.

  The quote was, ‘No more fascism!’, which looking back on I’m very embarrassed about. But there was certainly that feeling in the air at the time.

  affirmation

  (1990–2000)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  rock against work!

  Graham Don was keeping his head low. During the mid 1980s, he had been resident DJ at the Love Inn, located at the top of Ann Street in Fortitude Valley. The venue was owned by vice king Hector Hapeta, an overweight, unlovely man who for years had paid off the Licensing Branch in exchange for police protection of his prostitution interests.

  The Love Inn, however, was not a brothel. Instead, it was one of the few music venues in town regularly putting on interstate and occasionally overseas bands during Brisbane’s darkest years. In July 1986 legendary garage rockers the Flamin’ Groovies played there. When the venue was unable t
o meet the band’s guarantee, Hapeta was called. In a jam, he despatched some girls and pot to keep the group happy while he came up with the cash. The Groovies thought Brisbane was the best place they’d played since their native San Francisco in 1969.

  Hapeta’s world was about to fall apart. Fingered as (literally) Brisbane’s biggest underworld figure by Phil Dickie and Four Corners, he was summoned before the Fitzgerald Inquiry in August 1987. There he refused to answer 164 questions on the grounds of certain self-incrimination. The following year he was arrested and charged with heroin trafficking; in June 1989 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Before his death behind bars in 1999, Hapeta was in good company. He was joined by four former government ministers, along with many of the police he had bought off. The biggest casualty was the former commissioner. In August 1991, Terry Lewis – the man who would be Sir Terence – was sentenced to the maximum 14 years jail for official corruption and stripped of his knighthood.

  Also facing trial in 1991 was the former premier. Joh Bjelke-Petersen had originally been charged with one count of official corruption and another two counts of perjury before the Fitzgerald Inquiry. The special prosecutor, Doug Drummond QC, reduced this to a single charge of perjury in the belief that this would address the issue of corruption, given the allegation pertained to the former premier’s knowledge of a $100,000 political donation by a Singaporean businessman.

  The trial itself was stranger than fiction. After the first jury panel was mysteriously dismissed, the second was unable to reach a verdict after days of acrimonious deliberations. The deadlock – 10–2 in favour of a guilty verdict – had been forced by the jury foreman, Luke Shaw, later revealed to be a branch secretary of the Young Nationals with connections to the Friends of Joh group. The debacle resulted in an official inquiry into the jury’s selection process and an ABC docudrama, Joh’s Jury. But Bjelke-Petersen was never retried.

  As one of Hector Hapeta’s employees, Graham Don had come under heavy scrutiny. On one occasion he was dragged out of bed at six in the morning and down to the watch-house for questioning. For more than a year after the inquiry, he stayed away from nightclubs, doing labouring jobs and waiting for the purge to subside. A peripheral player in the old Brisbane scene, he would soon become a significant force in the new one. As a DJ he was aware of Brisbane’s unusual club culture.

  Graham Don: Brisbane was one of the only cities in Australia where you could actually go to a dance club and dance to rock & roll. When I was in my teens and going out underage, I’d go to nightclubs and I’d be dancing to the Stranglers, the Birthday Party, the Saints; Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life was huge on the dance floor. Whereas in Sydney it was all dance music.

  It would take much more than a change of government to change Brisbane. Even as the new Labor regime instigated a vigorous round of criminal justice and electoral reforms in line with Fitzgerald’s recommendations, the city was in something of a lull for the first year after the changing of the guard.

  The complacent administration of the lord mayor, Sallyanne Atkinson, exemplified the sense of stasis. A ludicrous bid to bring the 1992 Olympic Games to the city, coupled with Atkinson’s showy style and overweening personal ambition, were at odds with the fact that you still couldn’t get a decent meal after hours in Brisbane, and even if you could, you had to eat it indoors. In many ways Brisbane remained the big country town its detractors had always claimed.

  The music scene, too, was close to dormant. Part of it was simply generational. The Go-Betweens were gone; Ed Kuepper and Chris Bailey had settled into respectable solo careers. Occasional reformations by the Riptides were viewed with cynicism by the music press. Most of those whose late-’70s adolescence had been defined by the punk movement and its fraternal twin, radical politics, had grown up and got out.

  David Corazza: There are Brisbane mafias all around the world. The litmus test of that was when I left I had a going-away party and about 90 people rocked up, and it was a who’s who of our little coterie of the music and arts scene. And then I remember coming back about two years later and there were only two people out of that 90 who were left. It was a real wake-up when I realised that.

  By early 1991 Graham Don was ready to break back into clubs. The local scene wasn’t strong enough to support another live venue, but there was plenty of new music to play from elsewhere. From England came the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, playing euphoric guitar rock over a funky, shuffling beat that was impossible not to dance to. And the American underground was exploding. In the previous two years, Sonic Youth, Mudhoney and Dinosaur Jr had all undertaken successful tours of Australia, verifying the existence of a fresh young audience hungry for new sounds. Budding writer Simon McKenzie, later the editor of street paper Time Off, saw Mudhoney in March 1990, at Easts Leagues Club in suburban Coorparoo.

  Simon McKenzie: There were loads of people stage-diving, and one guy took it a hell of a lot further by getting up on top of the main speaker stacks and vaulting into space from about seven feet higher than everyone else. In mid-arc a flash went off – he had a camera and was taking a picture in the air. Mark Arm stopped singing and said, ‘Man, whoever that was, send that photo to Sub Pop! I gotta see it!’

  With Fitzgerald’s men having torn through the Valley like a cyclone, Don decided to relocate to the city centre. On 1 March he opened a new club in the Lands Office Hotel on George Street. Although it lasted barely 18 months, the Funkyard would become the hub for a new generation of music fans.

  Graham Don: The idea behind the Funkyard was to take junk culture and chuck it all together and spew it back out. The name came from looking through my records – I had a James Brown record next to the Birthday Party’s Junkyard, and I came up with Funkyard. It was just like everything mashed into one.

  Don was assisted by a former artist for the Love Inn, Paul Curtis. Wiry, hyperactive and, according to Don, ‘a total acid casualty, running up the walls, you couldn’t make sense of him’, Curtis was also something of an ideologue in his quest to do things independently.

  Paul Curtis: When I was at the Love Inn I had this naive concept that I was never going to take money for the art I did, so I refused to take payment from anyone. I would do it all off my own back, cover all the costs. If the costs were exorbitant I would try to get them to cover those costs, but I wouldn’t actually take any payment for the art itself, because I thought it would corrupt it. Of course the ridiculous thing is I was doing it for advertising, for other people to make money!

  A stint working for the Murdoch press in the late ’80s helped convince Curtis that being paid for his artwork wasn’t so bad after all, and his psychedelia-meets-splatter-movie imagery captured the Funkyard aesthetic perfectly. It also unwittingly tapped into another visual trend: the modern primitive look of rising Los Angeles bands such as Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Within two weeks the Funkyard was attracting 800 payers through its doors.

  By August the club had relocated to the more spacious Bertie’s Tavern on Elizabeth Street, under the Myer Centre. There the Funkyard went through the roof, with up to 1400 kids jamming into the room on Friday nights. When six police entered the venue one Friday evening – alarmed, perhaps, by the sudden proliferation of tattoos and dreadlocks – they found themselves hopelessly outnumbered.

  Graham Don: They walked through the middle of the crowd, and I turned off the music, jumped on the microphone and said, ‘Warning, warning, police are in the house, if you’ve got anything they can bust you for, drop it.’ The place went nuts. Everyone started throwing their cans of beer at the cops; they pulled their hats off and were throwing them around . . . They’d never seen that many weirdos in one place at one time!

  Other factors were at play. As Triple Zed struggled to adjust to life in its new Toowong studios – and to establish an identity for itself in the post-Fitzgerald era – the newly nationalised Triple J began broadcasting into Bris
bane. Triple J’s near wholesale appropriation of both the music and the listeners of public radio stations around the country suddenly gave previously marginal musical forms tremendous commercial impetus.

  In September 1991 Jane’s Addiction played Festival Hall. The gig sold out on the night, and the 850 fans turned away walked the block to the Funkyard instead. But when the band stepped off stage a few hours later, everyone who had seen the show tried to join the party. The resulting queue extended up Elizabeth Street all the way to the Treasury-On-George. Placing a speaker box outside, Graham Don cued the band’s hit Been Caught Stealing and cranked the volume up. And suddenly, just like the old song went, there was dancing in the street.

  Then came the Big Bang. An old Survivor, Bruce Anthon, had managed to import a few platters of Nirvana’s second album Nevermind into Kent Records more than a month before the album’s Australian release. Curtis and Don were the first in. Don played the single, Smells Like Teen Spirit, three times a night: ‘The place would just erupt every time.’

  At the crest of their fame, the band was booked to play Festival Hall – second-billed to the Violent Femmes – in January 1992. Nirvana’s set was short, with Kurt Cobain battling heroin addiction, a chronic stomach complaint and a sound mix that turned the first half of the show into mud. Until the band hit the chorus of Come As You Are: suddenly, the sound snapped into focus, the band blazed away, and a wall of beautiful noise sent the room into orbit.