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Who Owns Brisbane's Radical Past?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2016

Libby Connors  and
Drew Hutton
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Extract

When a history of the Australian environment movement was published several years ago, the joke that went around the environment movement was that the first (and sometimes the only thing) purveyors of the book would read was the index to check whether their names were there. If some of the reports we have heard from around the bookshops of Brisbane are true, Radical Brisbane has received a similar response. We feel for Ray Evans and Carole Ferrier, the editors of Radical Brisbane, because everyone who has been around the activist scene in Brisbane over the last 40 years will want to see themselves, or at least their organisations, represented. Inevitably, given the limitations of such publications, many have been disappointed. The point of this review essay is not to critique the inclusions and omissions in order to assuage individual egos, but to further an understanding of the basis of radical politics and to interpret why Brisbane has been the seat of dissent as much as of development in this state.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , January 2005 , pp. 91 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 

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References

Notes

1 Evans, Raymond Ferrier, Carole (eds), Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History (Melbourne: Vulgar Press, 2004).Google Scholar

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7 Fitzgerald, Ross, A History of Queensland: From 1915 to the 1980s (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1984): 575. In the 1980s, another young police officer, Nigel Powell, similarly resigned in protest. He later joined the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption and recently spoke out against a state funeral for Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen: see Nigel Powell, ‘Joh Bjelke-Petersen's Send-off Should Befit His Legacy to Queensland’, Online Opinion, 18 August 2004, www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2464Google Scholar

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13 Thelma Towers and the Residents Against Toxic Substances are discussed in Hutton and Connors, A History of the Australian Environment Movement: 215–16.Google Scholar

14 Ciaron O'Reilly's continuing activism against nuclear weapons has led to him serving time in prisons in the United States and Ireland. He has written of his political activism in Brisbane and overseas in two memoirs: The Revolution will Not be Televised: A Campaign for Free Expression in Queensland (Sydney, Jura, 1986); and Remembering Forgetting: A Journey of Non-Violent Resistance to the War in East Timor (Otford, NSW: Otford, 2001).Google Scholar

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19 Hutton and Connors, A History of the Australian Environment Movement: 71.Google Scholar

20 Wright, Judith, The Coral Battleground (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1977): 84, 105–06.Google Scholar

21 Hutton and Connors, A History of the Australian Environment Movement: 101.Google Scholar

22 Fitzgerald, History of Queensland: 446–49, 454–56.Google Scholar