The Word From Struggle Street

State Member of Cairns Rob Pyne’s resignation from the Labor Party in March 2016, leaving the Palaszczuk government on an equal footing with the LNP in State parliament, soon saw him branded as a product of the “State of Mind” afflicting Far North Queensland – a “cargo cult mentality” as one commentator put it that saw regionalist pork barrelling take precedence over ideas and political realism.

It is widely believed that Queensland has a peculiar “state of mind” – as Humphrey McQueen first put it in the late 1970s – but it is said to get more peculiar, and reactionary, the further you travel north. Today, this is perhaps best embodied by Bob Katter, the eccentric federal member for Kennedy whose mix of agrarian socialism and reactionary social ideas – there are no gays in his electorate, apparently – is said to typify the North’s tepid concoction of state-subsidised conservatism. News today that nine out of the country’s ten most conservative electorates lie in regional Queensland fits well into this narrative.

Continue reading “#CorbynofCairns: Rob Pyne and the history of Far North Queensland radicalism” →

Text of a talk I gave at the Right to the City/Brisbane Free Uni organised ‘More that Steel and Concrete’ event, held at the Bearded Lady on 31 May 2016

I was invited here tonight to give some thoughts on the history of struggles in West End and surrounds against over development. Just by way of introduction, I am a historian of social movements. I did a PhD a few years back at UQ, looking at Australian protest movements of the 1960s/70s and their global imagination and connections. Currently, I am writing a history of human rights discourse in Australia. What we call ‘Urban history’ figures large in my writing. I’m interested in how people imagine their city and construct meaning of it, particularly through what Henri Lefebvre, who coined the term ‘right to the city’, calls ‘producing spaces’ of opposition and contestation.

My comments will revolve around some documents I have looked at recently in the Fryer Library at UQ on opposition to Expo 88. In so doing, I want to explore what this opposition was, who was involved, what they wanted, and whether they can be seen to have succeeded in any meaningful way. But equally, I want to look at the experience of opposing Expo as a case study in how the past informs activism, and draw some general conclusions on what place ‘the past’ has in contemporary social movements – particularly the importance of historical memory but also the danger of what social scientists call ‘over-likeness’. Continue reading ““The wrong side of the river”: Expo ’88 and the Right to the City” →