BrisBAMN!?
Bringing the Streets into the Museum
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600006280Keywords:
Queensland, dismissive characterisation, cultural wastelands, boorish badlands, protestAbstract
I had been under the impression that there was only one Brisbane. — Steele Rudd
In 1921, Jack Lindsay wrote from Brisbane of Nietzsche's assertion ‘that the academic virtue is sleep, i.e., narcotisation’. A common academic and non-academic indulgence in remembering Brisbane is the narcotic of Queensland's extreme difference: a state of exceptional boredom and brutality. It is widely assumed that, for most of its history, Queensland was a sleepy backwater; its capital the country town described by a late nineteenth century visitor: ‘Brisbane is quite a pretty town, to be sure, but it bores you to death.’ Dismissive characterisations of Queensland coarsened as a result of Bjelke-Petersen's ascendency. If you were not bored to death by its cultural wastelands, you could be beaten close to it in the boorish badlands patrolled by his pigs. The crazed Dane fed the chooks while watching cranes rise over this animal farm, apparently untouchable in his Elsinore:
The rest of the country often thought [Queenslanders] a bit peculiar: a maverick state, populated by politically backward ‘banana benders’ who chose a crank … to rule them. These rather offensive stereotypes helped in turn to sustain a political myth that the government was somehow unique in its reactionary politics — even ‘fascist’ — making Petersen impossible to defeat or dislodge.
References
Rudd, Steele, ‘My First Day in A Government Office’, From City to Selection (1909), in The Rudd Family (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992), 195.
Lindsay, Jack, ‘The Academic Mind’ (1921), quoted in Dan O'Neill et al. . (eds), Up the Right Channels (St Lucia: James Prentice, 1970): 11.
Edmond Marin la Meslee, The New Australia (1883), translated by Russel Ward (London and Melbourne: Heinemann Educational, 1973): 75.
O'Lincoln, Tom, Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era (Melbourne: Bookmarks Australia, 1993), 128.
Laurie, Ross, ‘Political Detonations, 1975’, in Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier, with Jeff Rickertt (eds), Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History (Melbourne: The Vulgar Press, 2004), 304–08.
Hardt, Michael Negri, Antonio, Multitude: War and Democracy in The Age of Empire (London: Penguin, 2006), 25–26.
It was observed, for instance, that the exhibition lacked representation of the SEQEB strike: http://bushtelegraph.wordpress.com/2006/09/07taking-to-the-streets-exhibition-closing. On the other hand, Taking to the Streets included information and display items about most of the individuals and organisations from the period 1965–85 that Libby Connors and Drew Hutton criticised Radical Brisbane for neglecting: ‘Who Owns Brisbane's Radical Past?’, Queensland Review 12(1) (2005): 95, 97–98. Connors and Hutton were interviewed for Taking to the Streets and contributed memoirs of fellow activists.
Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with New Left Review, 1976), 925.
Colebatch, Hal G.P., ‘Out of Power, but the Left Just Won't Go Away’, The Australian, 10 October 2006, 12.
Rudd, ‘My First Day in A Government Office’, 197–98. Fifteen-year-old Arthur Hoey Davis ('Steele Rudd') encountered colonial museology in the person of Kendall Broadbent, ‘the doyen of the Queensland Museum's collectors’: Patricia Mather et al., A Time for a Museum: The History of the Queensland Museum 1862–1986 (Brisbane: Queensland Museum, 1986), 315–19.
Mather, A Time for a Museum, 201.
Rudd, Cf., ‘Mrs Petersen's Remains’, Back at Our Selection (1906): Dad accidentally exhumes a blackfellow's skeleton then empties ‘the coffin … on the dust-heap’.
Dias, Nélia, ‘The Visibility of Difference: Nineteenth-century French Anthropological Collections’, in Sharon MacDonald, ed., The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), 38.
King, David and Porter, Cathy, Blood and Laughter: Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 33.
McQueen, Humphrey, ‘Foreword’, in Evans and Ferrier, Radical Brisbane, 11. Cf. McQueen in 1976: ‘the printing industry in the past few years has undergone a revolution far more extensive than the one produced by Caxton. With a good electric typewriter and other relatively inexpensive equipment, book publishing has once again come within the financial reach of almost any group with something to say.’ Gallipoli to Petrov: Arguing with Australian History (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 123; and Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (1951), translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (Verso: London and New York, 2005), 51 (#30).
Ferrier, Carole, ‘Afterword’, in Evans and Ferrier, Radical Brisbane, 317.
Some Wobblies trans-valued Nietzsche's anti-socialist philosophy into revolutionary terms: Verity Burgmann, Revolutionary Industrial Unionism: The Industrial Workers of the World in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 132.
I hope a wide selection of radical Brisbane's ‘ephemera’ is anthologised like Peter Stansill and David Zane Mairowitz (eds), BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera 1965–70 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
Craig, Alexander, ed., Twelve Poets 1950–1970 (Brisbane: Jacaranda, 1971), 244.
Cf. Dan and Pete Thomas's contributions to Carole Ferrier and Pelan, Rebecca (eds), The Point of Change: Marxism/Australia/History/Theory (St Lucia: Australian Studies Centre and Department of English, University of Queensland, 1998).
Liberal MLA Don Cameron, quoted in Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, Seizures of Youth: The Sixties and Australia (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1991), 188.
Neville, Paul, ‘Condolences Hon Sir Johannes (Joh) Bjelke-Petersen KCMG’, paulneville.com.au.
Marx, Capital, 586.
The ‘dole bludger’ myth is debunked in O'Lincoln, Years of Rage, 110–27.
Kellett, John, ‘Bread or Blood, 1865’, in Evans and Ferrier, Radical Brisbane, 44; Marx, Capital, 342.
Connors and Hutton, ‘Who Owns Brisbane's Radical Past?’ 96.
Churchill, Ward, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (Oakland: AK Press, 2003), 275–76. Hardt and Negri criticise Churchill's Pacifism as Pathology (1999), but defend the ‘democratic use of violence’: 341–47, 363 n. 29, 403 n. 123.
Connors, Libby, ‘Traditional Law and Indigenous Resistance at Moreton Bay 1842–1855’, Australia and New Zealand Law and History E-Journal (2005): 117.
Ramsay, Robert (8 December 1869), quoted in Maurice French, ed., Travellers in a Landscape: Visitors’ Impressions of the Darling Downs 1827–1954 (Toowoomba: USQ Press, 1994), 66. Coincidentally, the Museum of Brisbane exhibition Shakespeare in Brisbane overlapped with Taking to the Streets.
(Lt-Colonel) Godfrey Charles Mundy, Our Antipodes: or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies. With a Glimpse of the Gold Fields, Vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), 228. Cf. Gary Foley: ‘Ours is a non-competitive society; for want of a better term, it is a socialist society.’: ‘Teaching Whites a Lesson’, in Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee, eds, Staining the Wattle (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble and Penguin, 1988), 200–01.
'The Bad Days Will End' (1962), quoted in Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology, translated by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 82. Cf. the use of Hamlet by Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and ‘Speech at the Anniversary of the People's Paper' (1856); Trotsky, who called the Menshevik Martov ‘the Hamlet of democratic socialism'; Lukacs, Lenin (1924); and Derrida, Specters of Marx (1993).
A concurrent exhibition, Taking to the Streets NOW, showed at Visible Ink in Fortitude Valley.
Scott-Heron, Gil, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (Flying Dutchman, 1970); Ciaron O'Reilly, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised! A Campaign for Free Expression in Queensland (Brisbane: C. O'Reilly, 1983).
Burroughs, William S. (1970), quoted in Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (London: Virgin Books, 1993), 202.
Bahnisch, Mark, ‘Taking to the Streets in Cyberspace’, On Line Opinion, 7 August 2006, www.onlineopinion.com.au/print.asp?article=4721.
Butler, Samuel, Erewhon or Over the Ranges (Auckland: Golden Press, 1973), 80.
Chtcheglov, Ivan, ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 3.
