Pig City

by Andrew Stafford

  The result was a watershed for Triple Zed, which was behind in rent and facing the expiration of its two-year lease on the Toowong studios in July. Desperately searching for new premises, the station was saved by another remarkable stroke of good fortune when it was invited to move into run-down but relatively spacious premises at 291 St Pauls Terrace in downtown Fortitude Valley. The building was owned by the Search Foundation, set up by the Communist Party in order to divest its assets as it wound down its Australian operations.

  In April 1993 Parker was joined at Triple Zed by two more voices from the past. Jim Beatson was at a loose end, and he persuaded former station journalist Jon Baird to accompany him back to the station, initially with the aim of restoring its proud but ailing newsroom. With not even a telephone recorder booth to conduct interviews, ‘news’ consisted of two weekday shifts with announcers reading chunks of newspaper text. It was the best the station could muster.

  Jim Beatson: When I arrived the station had 700 subscriptions and it was going down. It had seemingly no audience. One of the station’s staff, and the person shall remain nameless, actually told me that the fact we had no listeners was proof that Triple Zed was on the cutting edge. I thought it was a scandal.

  Dismayed by the ‘scruffy, tacky mess’ before them, Beatson and Baird persuaded the collective to lash out on the construction of two interview booths while recruiting a new team of volunteers, mainly university students, to inject some life into the station. There remained no shortage of material to occupy journalists in Queensland: the premier, Wayne Goss, had disappointed many with a conservative approach to social reform, and police corruption, though less brazen, had hardly vanished overnight. But Triple Zed by then was its own worst enemy.

  Jim Beatson: There was definitely dealing going on at the station. I remember on one occasion a teacher rang me – we had a number of high school students there on work placement – and quietly warned me that a student had been offered drugs for sale.

  Realising the futility of trying to rebuild a functioning newsroom inside a broadcaster that had lost touch with its listeners, Beatson approached the Queensland University of Technology to undertake audience research. The results threatened to tear the station apart for good. In the end, a sanitised version of the report needed to be prepared.

  Phil Parker: The QUT survey was very much kept under wraps. People left over that, saying, ‘What’s so bad about this bit of paper that you can’t tell us exactly how it is?’ In the end they did a summary of it, and people were given an overview of what the feedback was for each announcer, and a lot of the stuff was just devastating.

  Jim Beatson: Clearly there were a lot of people that absolutely should not have been announcers, they didn’t have the first clue, and training them wouldn’t have done much for them. It was probably the wrong decision, but any radio station has to continue, and if you sack a third of your announcers – or a third of your announcers walk out on the spot – you need to be able to replace them.

  While undergoing this painful self-examination, Triple Zed also found itself wrestling with the logistics of running what had become a biannual festival, financed on alcohol and powered by a skeleton of overworked volunteers. It was an increasingly unhappy equation. Although the station was making enough money from Market Day to stay afloat, it soon found itself at loggerheads with the Brisbane City Council over the state of the venues after the event. In March 1993 the event moved from Captain Burke to Albert Park in the city; by 1994 that too was off limits. While volunteers worked themselves into the ground to put the event on, too few had the energy or the inclination to deal with the aftermath the next day. Lord Mayor Jim Soorley had reason to feel especially aggrieved.

  Jim Beatson: I discovered that Soorley hated Triple Zed because the year before, when Triple Zed had sought his permission to hold Market Day, he’d knocked them back on the grounds that the crowd had left broken glass everywhere, which they had, and damaged the gardens, which they had . . . The station regarded that as completely unreasonable and called on their listeners to ring Soorley and tell him what they thought of him, and so Soorley received a whole lot of abusive phone calls, which made him dislike Triple Zed intensely, and frankly I could understand where he was coming from.

  Along with conducting research into Triple Zed’s audience, the QUT group also surveyed 800 Market Day patrons. The results were equally depressing. What the station naively envisaged as a free show designed to reward the loyalty of its subscribers was being overrun by what Phil Parker, a teetotaller, dubbed ‘the 16,000-legged lager monster’.

  Jim Beatson: I wrote Soorley a letter and apologised, went and saw him and tried to patch up that problem. His line was that we needed to fence off the event, and we knew that would cost a lot of money, so the research was designed to find out how people would feel about a cover charge. And the results were quite shocking. The great majority of them didn’t listen to Triple Zed, and when asked the question ‘Would you care if Triple Zed closed down tomorrow?’, the only thing that concerned them was the end of Market Day, because it was a great piss-up, a great atmosphere, and it was unbelievably cheap.

  Triple Zed gradually improved its position, progressively replacing several announcers and recording a steady rise in subscriptions. Most importantly, Beatson began negotiating to buy the St Pauls Terrace premises from the Search Foundation, a move that eventually gave Triple Zed a previously undreamt-of financial asset.

  Jim Beatson: A number of people from the Communist Party or children of members of the Communist Party were very much aware that Triple Zed had done a lot of work that [they] largely approved of. So we persuaded them that the best thing they could do was sell us the building . . . Of course we had an enormous amount of fundraising to do. We had to present books to the state government and the books hadn’t been done for three years! So we had to put a huge amount of effort into getting Triple Zed’s hopeless collection of shoeboxes full of papers into accounts that could be presented to an auditor.

  Beatson’s efforts to revive the station’s fortunes were not universally appreciated. Some correctly saw their positions threatened. Others, in a throwback to the early years, viewed his attempts to modernise Triple Zed as a sell-out of its core values. Above all, his belief that he knew what was best for the station – a natural result, perhaps, of his decorated place in its history – alienated the collective, which he held in contempt.

  Dave Lennon: There was tension, but I think Jim brought a lot of that on himself. Jim has this attitude where he feels that what he’s doing is right and to hell with everyone else and their ideas, and in a collective environment that arrogance got a lot of people’s backs up. In some ways Jim’s conservative too, so there was tension there.

  Jim Beatson: I’m committed to the progressive side of politics very strongly, but there were a lot of complaints that the politics at the station was truly infantile. It was the infantile left at its most embarrassing, and a lot of the audience disliked it intensely, because they felt they were being patronised by people who knew less about politics than themselves.

  A few were motivated by nastier impulses. When Beatson moved a motion proposing those at the station with drug dependencies be relieved of positions handling money, he found the locks of his car jammed full of Super Glue. Exhausted and dispirited, he left the station to its fate in early 1995.

  In October 1994, Market Day shifted again, this time to Musgrave Park in South Brisbane. The survey results had made the decision to fence the event a relatively easy one, with non-subscribers charged a token $5. But the additional income failed to prevent costs from blowing out. Upwards of 30 bands were needed to satisfy a growing audience, whose thirst for alcohol was matched by a proportional need for more toilets and more security.

  Triple Zed’s fractious relationship with the council meant every Market Day was preceded by increasingly onerous negotiations, as each event became literally more e
ventful. When an extra Market Day was held at the University of Queensland to coincide with orientation week in February 1995, summer rains forced the intended homecoming party to relocate from the Great Court to a concrete multi-storey car park. And when the regular event was moved back from its usual March date to 29 April, the oncoming winter chill resulted in punters imperilling the station’s bond money by lighting fires around Musgrave Park when the sun went down.

  But most ominous of all was the steadily increasing police presence. On 28 October 1995 a weekend event intended to celebrate the Roxy nightclub’s 10th birthday went awry. With the venue holding only 1500 people, Triple Zed had proposed the closure of the adjoining Alfred Street in order to accommodate a second stage. When the council decreed at the last minute that the street was to reopen at 6pm instead of the advertised time of 10pm, the station was faced with a hostile force intent on dispersing a large and inebriated crowd. But the 20 arrests that followed proved to be a mere precursor to the debacle of the following year.

  In February 1996 Wayne Goss’ Labor Government fell in extraordinary circumstances. After two terms in office, Goss had held onto a single-seat majority in the parliament following a stiff rebuke in the July 1995 state election. His fate was sealed when a fresh election was ordered in the disputed Townsville-based seat of Mundingburra. Sensitive to the whims of conservative Queenslanders, Goss had run his government like a machine, basing his campaign on economic management with a lash of law and order.

  But law and order was an issue on which Labor could never win. In the run-up to the Mundingburra election, the opposition, led by the Nationals’ Rob Borbidge, signed a secret pact with the police union in exchange for its support in the campaign. The so-called Memorandum of Understanding committed the coalition to winding back the powers of the Criminal Justice Commission, the anti-corruption body set up in the wake of the Fitzgerald Inquiry. It also gave the police union the right to veto the appointment of a police commissioner and named six assistant commissioners the union wanted removed from their posts.3

  If there was nothing legally improper about the deal, it certainly flew in the face of the state’s post-Fitzgerald reforms, which the coalition referred to as an experiment. When the Liberal Party won the Mundingburra election, the reformed conservative coalition unexpectedly found itself back in power, forming a minority government with the support of a conservative independent. Moreover, the pole position of the police in Queensland’s political life had been restored: the police union revealed its ‘understanding’ with the coalition by trumpeting its victory in its members’ newsletter.

  Despite increasing difficulties staging Market Day, Musgrave Park seemed a natural home for the event. Utilised mainly by the Aboriginal community, with whom Triple Zed maintained a cordial relationship, the park had been neglected for years by the council. Peter Rohweder, who began coordinating Market Days for the station with the pleasantly uneventful Zed-O-Mitter event of 23 March 1996, found the council relatively amenable to Musgrave Park’s use after the station’s barring from Albert Park in the city.

  Peter Rohweder: It was a crappy park anyway – there was hardly any turf, they’d lay the turf once a year, there were lots of rocks. Usually when we went through it we’d pick up all the glass that was already there from broken beer bottles, so we’d be doing them a favour by cleaning it out.

  Rohweder had also built a sound working relationship with Sergeant John Vincent and Constable Mark Simpson from the West End police station. Overseeing one of the most cosmopolitan populations in the city, with a high number of Aboriginal, homeless and mentally ill persons, West End police were known for taking a somewhat more discretionary approach to law enforcement than their city counterparts. They were also no stranger to rock festivals: for several years the Livid Festival had been held without incident in Davies Park at the bottom of Jane Street.

  With Vincent away on holiday, Simpson took over the brief for the spring Market Day, Cybernana, set for 19 October. Having already liaised with Rohweder for Zed-O-Mitter in March, Simpson foresaw nothing untoward in the lead-up to the event. Subcontracted by Triple Zed to oversee police operations on the day, he prepared his usual operational order confirming arrangements. No one can readily explain why, on the morning of the event, he had matters taken abruptly out of his hands.

  Mark Simpson: The internal management of the police service . . . They have their own little empires. So I was there on the day, but not in the capacity I was supposed to be. They changed things, brought somebody in that hadn’t been involved to run the event, with no experience of doing it previously.

  Peter Rohweder: The police force is all about rank and file. So we had been dealing with Mark Simpson, a constable, and then suddenly we were dealing with someone else who was above him. We’d say, ‘Oh, we’re talking to Mark Simpson,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, but he’s below me, you’re talking to me now.’

  The day dawned fine and hot. The crowd poured through the gates, more than Triple Zed had anticipated. The line-up of bands, featuring a young and raw Something For Kate, was tougher than Zed-O-Mitter, which had kept things mellow with headlining performances by rising local folk-based bands the Toothfaeries and Isis. As the heat began to rise and the beer consumption increased, queues formed for the porta-loos. A few who couldn’t wait were charged with indecent exposure when they made the mistake of urinating up against a large Moreton Bay fig that happened to be next to the police command post.

  The number of police initially present on the day is contested. Simpson is adamant his team was under-resourced to deal with the large crowd, beginning with just two mounted units and five members of the Public Safety Response Team, along with a few officers from the West End station, of which he was one. Others, however, noticed the police presence early on. Phil Parker, working behind the bar, claims never to have seen so many, including plain-clothed detectives. Tam Patton, whose band John Lee Spider had performed earlier in the afternoon, was also spooked.

  Tam Patton: Everybody commented, and I myself noticed at the time, that there was a really unusually strong police presence. There’s always a police presence at any kind of festival event, Market Days perhaps stronger than usual, but in this case it just seemed abnormal.

  The discrepancy in accounts may be explained by the appearance of the PSRT. Effectively the riot squad, the PSRT are easily identified, distinguished by head-squeezing baseball caps in place of hats. Far from providing reassurance, the mere presence of the PSRT communicated to both Market Day organisers and patrons that the police were anticipating trouble or, at worst, intent on making their own. Other witnesses reported seeing PSRT members unloading helmets, shields and batons adjacent to the park in Russell Street.4

  Communications were breaking down. Terry O’Connor, Triple Zed’s security coordinator, was under the impression the PSRT would only be called in the event of a major incident. Rohweder was more sanguine, and although he describes the police presence as ‘really uncomfortable’, he remained preoccupied with keeping the event running. Simpson’s operational order states the PSRT would be on site for the duration of the function.5 Paranoia – always an active ingredient in relations between police and Triple Zed – rose like the stench of urine around the base of the fig trees.

  By late afternoon a monstrous anvil of cloud was billowing in the west.

  At the height of festivities, the crowd climbed to over 8000 people. Rubbish was ground into the weary turf; dust kicked up from the mosh pit in front of the stages. The 16,000-legged lager monster was alive and well.

  Mark Simpson: There was a lady in a porta-loo and a couple of jokers decided it might be fun to tip it over while she was inside. When people make complaints of a certain nature, it doesn’t leave a lot of options but to arrest people, take them away and speak to them about their behaviour, and if they’re intoxicated as well you’ve got to wait until they sober up before you can do that.

  Sim
pson claims another much more unpleasant element had permeated the crowd: a group of skinheads were harassing the small group of Aboriginal people who made the park their home. The skins had turned up at Market Day before, notably in 1993 at Albert Park where they found themselves on the wrong side of both the bands and the crowd, but their presence at Cybernana is disputed. John Birmingham, whose journalism had already made him persona non grata with the Queensland Police Service, later reported on the day’s events for Rolling Stone.

  John Birmingham: Well, I interviewed 36 people and that’s the first I’ve ever heard of [skinheads]. I did hear about arrests all the way through the afternoon, mostly for indecent exposure and drunkenness and basically bad attitude.

  Mark Simpson: The crowd only see two blue uniforms escorting somebody out who’s screaming and yelling to get lost and other language . . . You can’t stop and explain to a drunken crowd why you’ve done what you’ve just done, it doesn’t work that way. So that turned the crowd [against us].

  When station journalist Brendan Greenhill arrived for his bar shift in the gathering darkness shortly after 6.30pm, antagonism between the police and crowd was reaching critical mass. He was greeted by the sight of two burly officers frogmarching a reveller out of the gates and into a waiting van. Told to forget about his shift, he was sent home to pick up his tape recorder and wide-band receiver instead.

  Thunder began rumbling across the field. With rain on the way, most of the crowd started to drift off.

  It took 25 minutes for Greenhill to walk back to his Highgate Hill home. As the rain began to tumble down, he paused under an awning to gather his wits before making the return journey. Tuning his receiver into the police channel, he realised there was going to be no waiting out the approaching storm. The call for reinforcements had already gone out. From his position on the hill, Greenhill could see the red and blue strobes of police cars descending on the venue.