The Early Punk Scene in Brisbane, Australia, as a Site of Social and Postcolonial Rebellion

The emergence of punk music is usually associated with a dark nihilism rising out of working-class Britain under the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, with the poor inner city or wasted industrial landscapes of England, northern Ireland or Eastern Europe, or the USA. Punk is rarely associated with sunny colonial spaces. Yet Brisbane, Australia, the city with the most hours of sunshine in the world, played a seminal role in the emergence of punk. For many Australians, Brisbane’s recent cultural history is associated with a dialectic that formed between the conservative and repressive government of the Premier of the State, John Bjelke-Peterson, and the emergence of a lively, anarchistic punk rock scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Saints, the Leftovers, Razar, the Riptides, and many others were bands that mixed the new sound of fast-paced rhythms with regional politics, supported by an independent university radio station, a local alternative press, and the conversion of community halls into dance floors. This chapter examines the political context of the punk and indie music scene in late 1970s Brisbane to explore how it formed at a time of social and political tension and change. Using a cross-disciplinary cultural studies approach, drawing on cultural history, discourse analysis, and postcolonial theory, the study explores what was specific about the sub-cultural groups in Brisbane who formed around what was seen as new musical forms and the impact of local factors such as isolation, communications, and government policy. It is argued that punk and indie bands in Brisbane sought to both resist a condition of oppression and celebrate a particular postcolonial identity and condition. Most music historians identify the first punk bands as those playing at the NY clubs, the bands The New York dolls, Suicide, the Ramones, etc., around 1975.Yet in Brisbane, the band called The Saints formed in 1973 and was already playing punk music. In 1976, the Saints became the first punk band to release a recording as a single outside of the USA, thereby preceding the UK’s Sex Pistols, the Damned, and the Clash. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, dozens of punk bands had sprung up in the Brisbane area. The sound attracted an urban youth crowd disaffected with the Queensland mainstream leisure culture revolving principally around the beach as well as with the alternative lifestyle hippy counterculture of the 1970s. Punk music in Brisbane was an urban and suburban phenomenon that saw an energetic scene of dances that took place in inner-city halls, pubs, vintage ballrooms, and even migrant education centers spread often through the intermediary of the University radio station 4ZZZ. As the concerts multiplied, the scene soon came to the attention of the state Premier and the Queensland Police. The Queensland Police formed a special undercover Task Force who were specifically instructed to target punk concerts, start fights, make arrests, and have the concerts shut down. Several punk bands fought back with songs about police violence, corruption as well as the racial politics of the state. This oppositional force went beyond Brisbane bands with touring UK band the Stranglers and even the Clash finding themselves involved in the aboriginal rights protest movement and Queensland politics.