Sam Watson didn’t expect to be here again, protesting for the right to protest peacefully in Queensland, where street demonstrations were once made illegal and brutally suppressed.

“There was this terrible, almost overwhelming terror that we were going to be bashed by the police, and we were,” remembers Watson, an Indigenous Australian activist who marched out of King George Square and into a bank of uniformed police, five men deep, in Brisbane in October 1977.

“It was a very different environment, the degree of brutality and this terrible feeling of absolute fear. Everything has changed, but then nothing has changed at all.”

In the past month authorities in Queensland, for the first time since the era of the repressive premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, have sought to subdue a series of escalating protests and civil disobedience. They have used populist tactics from that rarely lamented period – describing protesters as “extremists” based on unsubstantiated claims, and citing concerns about traffic disruption as a means to silence dissent.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Environmental protesters on Charlotte Street in Brisbane on Wednesday. Photograph: Jono Searle/AAP

The climate protest group Extinction Rebellion has struck a nerve in Queensland, home to the world’s most controversial coal project, and where the Labor government has pivoted in favour of the coal industry in a bid to win back blue-collar support after a shock federal election result.

Ongoing civil disobedience by climate activists, and the government’s response to propose new laws banning “locking” devices and broaden police powers, has raised concern about basic civil liberties not seen in Queensland since the 1970s. On Wednesday morning, about 150 people demonstrated to defend the right to protest. The LNP-led Brisbane city council unsuccessfully went to court in an attempt to shut it down.

Of course, few who lived through the police-led violence of the Bjelke-Petersen era would suggest that current events bear a direct comparison. But what rankles now is the apparent failure to respect those lash scars on Queensland’s history; the battles fought by a generation of activists and civil libertarians, derided then as a fringe movement in a deeply conservative state.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen declared: ‘The day of political street march is over.’ Photograph: Getty Images

“It wasn’t only the police and the terrible violence, but the way in which the broader community just accepted what was happening in the streets,” Watson says. “They walked the path with Joh, and by their inaction they totally endorsed what Joh and his police were doing.

“There were clear political rewards for that style of extremist conservative politics. That has carried through now. [The Queensland government] is just rushing at a breakneck speed back to the populist side of politics, which gives people on the left nowhere to turn.”

Protesting for the right to protest

“The day of political street march is over,” Bjelke-Petersen proclaimed in September 1977. “Anybody who holds a street march, spontaneous or otherwise, will know they’re acting illegally. Don’t bother applying for a march permit. You won’t get one. That’s government policy now.”

The “right to protest” marches that followed were among the most significant public demonstrations held in Australia. More than 2000 people were arrested at 26 separate protests, 418 on one afternoon in October, as they attempted to defy the ban by walking out of King George Square.

Many of those involved had protested against the Springbok rugby tour in 1971, when Bjelke-Petersen declared a state of emergency, striking a secret deal to turn a blind eye to police brutality. The protest march ban brought together activists from disparate causes – Indigenous rights, women’s rights, peaceniks, environmentalists. Their collective anger and energy became momentum on the streets.

Jenny Gow, then a journalist filing for the newspaper Nation Review, photographed many of the arrests at the October rally.

“To say the police were out in force was an absolute understatement,” Gow says. “It seemed like they were trying to invite activism, to invite defiance. But the outbreak of civil disobedience was part of a broader trend towards change and that era seemed like a sudden release of a lot of pressures. It was the real start of a mood for change in the Joh era that culminated in the demise of the Bjelke-Petersen government.”

In Gow’s archive is a black-and-white photograph of three lawyers, waiting for clients to be released after the largest October, 1977 protest. One is Wayne Goss, who would become Queensland premier in 1989. Another is Terry O’Gorman, who has remained a champion of civil liberties.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Queensland police during Wednesday’s march in Brisbane. Photograph: Jono Searle/AAP

“Bjelke-Petersen used the concept of violence to sell [the street protest ban],” O’Gorman says. “His justification at the time was that there were violent protests. There were not. That then led to numerous arrests, including … for people walking around the block protesting about the fact you couldn’t protest.”

O’Gorman says the current situation is the first serious test of Queensland’s peaceful assembly act, introduced in 1992 and a key reform designed to drag the state out of the Bjelke-Petersen era. He says the Brisbane city council’s recent court challenge to a protest – on the grounds it would cause traffic disorder – was the first time any local authority had applied to block a protest march under the law.

“There is language now emerging … that I’ve described as forked-tongue criticisms of protesters,” he said.

O’Gorman said the Brisbane lord mayor, Adrian Schrinner, had engaged in “a cynical attempt to exploit public criticism about the disruptive effect of recent protest actions, a cynical beating of the law and order drum”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lawyers Terry O’Gorman, left, and Wayne Goss, centre, waiting for clients to be released from Brisbane watch house. Photograph: Jenny Gow.

He said the premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, in claiming without producing evidence that protesters were setting booby traps and intending to harm emergency services workers, was deploying “a typical politician’s tactic or ruse to conjure up spectres or concerns about violence”.

Popular support for those sorts of political measures has been fuelled by newspaper columns dehumanising Extinction Rebellion protesters and calling for the sort of crackdown that occurred under Bjelke-Petersen.

Bjelke-Petersen's justification at the time was that there were violent protests. There were not. Terry O'Gorman

In 1977, a month after the landmark October protests, the National-Liberal Coalition government was comfortably re-elected in conservative Queensland. Bjelke-Petersen was in power for another decade, one marked by police raids on abortion clinics and orders to tear condom machines from walls at the University of Queensland. His tenure was cemented by a weak Labor opposition and a gerrymander that gave disproportionate influence to rural voters.

Civil disobedience, for a while at least, changed nothing. And then things changed.

The Fitzgerald inquiry and its 1989 report built upon work by journalists to expose graft and misconduct among police and politicians. Slowly, some light had made its way into the Sunshine State.

‘Destined to repeat history’

Julianne Schultz, in her 2008 Griffith Review essay Disruptive Influences, recounted the Bjelke-Petersen era from a unique vantage point in history, as a cohort of Queenslanders shaped by the tumult of the 1970s and 1980s settled into high office.

“The past is not a foreign country, but the source of psychological strength and scars,” Schultz wrote. “Australia’s new political leaders are a product of a time and place that was uniquely volatile.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest As global politics has embraced a shift towards populism, Queensland has moved again to crack down on protesters. Photograph: Jono Searle/AAP

“The lessons learned during those years – about the importance of civil rights and political institutions, about the way to imagine, make and effect change, the extraordinary importance of education, the power of the media, the capacity of public opinion to shift and the importance of treating people decently despite political differences – have had an impact on a generation of people who are now moving into the prime of their lives.”

A decade on, as global politics has embraced a shift towards populism and as Queensland moves again to crack down on protesters, the radicals and civil libertarians of the 1970s, who became the leaders of a generation, have moved on. Their institutional memories appear to have gone with them.

“Those that were alive and politically active, among the 400 ordinary people who were arrested in one afternoon, many of them are dead or so old they no longer take part in the political process,” O’Gorman says.

“When you forget history or conveniently airbrush it out, then you’re destined to repeat history.”