It’s hard to explain what it felt like to someone who wasn’t there.



During the 1970s and for much of the 1980s, Queensland – under the rule of infamous shotgun-wielding state premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen – was a police state. Paranoid of organised insurgency against his rule, his National party’s freedom of assembly rules made gatherings of more than three people illegal without a permit.

And, as stated by posters outside Prehistoric, a lively and often riveting play set in the Brisbane underground music scene of the late 1970s, amendments to the Traffic Act in 1977 made a police officer the final arbiter of whether a demonstration should be permitted. “In other words,” explains the play’s director and writer Marcel Dorney, “if a cop told you to stop doing something that was it.”

These powers were deployed a fair bit in order to break up gigs of any kind because gigs were very rarely organised in licensed venues because there were very few licensed venues ... because there were very few licenses issued.

“Knowing your rights could get you into trouble,” says Dorney dryly.

Stories of how the police would abuse their powers to break up gigs are legion – there was an infamous gig at Caxton St Hall on 30 November 1979 where seven patrol cars showed up to brutally disperse the punters.

John Willsteed, former bassist with the Go-Betweens and the pivotal Brisbane feminist punk band Xero, remembers another night in Paddington that same year: “Rock Against Poofter Bashing – I was having an argument with the women downstairs who owned the hall about how loud it was, and then the cops came in with their dogs and took all the money from the door.” The musician recalls how monotonously regular and expected it was, that “shit like that would happen”.

Brisbane punk bands from 77-82 reunite at Return to White Chairs.

This much is known, and often discussed. The 1989 GE Fitzgerald inquiry into Queensland police corruption (which finally brought an end to Bjelke-Petersen’s 19-year reign as premier) led to the jailing of three ministers and a police commissioner. A few years ago, Andrew Stafford’s book Pig City documented the institutionalised corruption and oppression that permeated the lives of now-famous Brisbane bands like the Saints and the Go-Betweens, and also helped fuel their music.

The book itself has become totemic in Queensland and wider afield. It gives an excellent sense of the context behind the Brisbane musical underground – the Saints are held to have made the world’s first “punk” record, with the self-released (I’m) Stranded in 1976, before even Ramones. Harder to communicate is the actual feeling of what it was like to be a disaffected youth living in Brisbane (in particular) during the Bjelke-Petersen years.

This is where Prehistoric comes in – a four-actor show featuring Kathryn Marquet, Sarah McLeod, John Russell and Reuben Witsenhuysen – which, among many other things, is a play about four young people who form a punk band in Brisbane in the 1970s. It’s a thoroughly visceral experience, in among the self-examination and acknowledgement of undocumented police abuse, and the urging for folk to leave police states as soon as they can. (“Why would you stay? Only if you’re arrogant enough to think you can change the system, or you’re a narcissist.”) Often, it really feels like you’re there in 78 and 79, hiding in the shadows, running down the streets from cop cars and thrashing a loud guitar disharmoniously through a patched-up amplifier.

“Ramones or Clash?” the self-consciously cool (and shy) male guitarist asks the up-for-it gay drummer, to which his new band-mate starts clapping his hands and chanting “Hey ho, let’s go.” “Which Slit do you prefer?” the two women ask each other. “Ari [Up, singer] or Viv [Albertine, guitarist]?” Again, there is only one possible answer.

John Russell and Reuben Witsenhuysen in Prehistoric. Photograph: Darren Thomas

Over the course of 90 minutes, the audience is taken on a bumpy ride of shared emotion and disillusionment and anguished late night drunken ramblings. And black humour. There’s plenty of that. One female band member is treated with suspicion and worse by her work colleagues because she knows how to use a screwdriver. The would-be guitarist lets rip with a choice swear-word or two in a school physics lesson. Gigs are regularly broken up by police.

There’s a brutally funny and sad scene when the four musicians hide out in a children’s movie theatre and shed tears over Watership Down, and a scary, scary climax, in which tension is not lessened one bit by the actors’ habit of standing to one side and discussing what they’ve just performed, what they’re about to perform and its relation to “reality”.

And whenever the Saints blare out in all their spiteful glory through the tiny venue’s speakers, you can’t help but feel thrills racing across your neck.

I ask Dorney about the realism of centring a play around a band featuring two women in 1978. Punk rock in Australia was mainly male. “There were some bands – Xero. They changed that shit up all the time,” he responds. There’s even a scene in Prehistoric that feels directly inspired by a quote in Pig City – “He got walloped as well, they both get arrested, and I’m sitting on the footpath in my taffeta petticoat watching the whole thing”, ex-Toe Suckers bassist Anne Jones recalls about the infamous Caxton Hall incident.

“It might feel a bit simplistic, but there’s a lot to explain,” the director says. “It opens up possibilities of negotiation – it asks the question: ‘Why do we do it this way?’”

Kathryn Marquet and Sarah McLeod in Prehistoric. Photograph: Darren Thomas

“Brisbane then isn’t that different to Brisbane now,” says Willsteed. “There were a lot of new buildings. It was pretty quiet at night, everything would shut down at night time, the way it does now. There were a couple of spots of ethnic diversity – the Valley had some European stuff, all of which moved to New Farm when the Valley started to swell. It was like now, only really reduced.”

Clubs were owned by the “famous hoodlums” the Bellinos. “They put on punk bands because they couldn’t give a shit. We hired the whole floor of a building directly behind the Empire Hotel for $25 a month. It was dirt cheap. The Apartments would practise where the zoo is now. The good things about the Valley was that it was where the more marginalised would hang – punky kids, black fellas, gay people. The night time places were much more blended – it took the 80s to separate them out.”

In an inspired casting decision, Dorney demanded that his four actors learn instruments they hadn’t previously played – the resulting cacophony/fiery polemic is as good a distillation of the ethos and sound of underground Brisbane bands Zero, kiddie-punk stalwarts Clag and the Leftovers as I’ve seen in a long time. The drummer in particular is a revelation: the female musician I’m sitting next to states an avowed preference for the way he throws his whole body into his work. He doesn’t cross his arms, either. My favourite is the guitarist, though. Viv – remember?

“Punk rock is the idea the idea of having control over what you do,” says Dorney. “Having a sense of your taste, your capabilities – also there was a simplicity and directness to punk that was genuinely smart, genuinely funny and expressive. Your personality, your attitude towards the world comes out through your music. The capability to start with simple materials and express something you haven’t heard expressed – that’s still intoxicating. In Brisbane in the late 1970s, it must have been overwhelming. It’s not ‘no rules’, it’s the idea that we’re making the fucking rules – we can change them whenever we want.”

• Prehistoric is at Brisbane festival until 27 September, then at Melbourne fringe festival from 30 September until 5 October