2 May 2022
We bring you on the ground at the Labour Day march this year as we listen to the union chants and talk to unionists and activists about Labour day and the labour movement. I sure hope you like bagpipes.
Outro Song: Solidarity Forever - Phil Monsour
19 April 2022
On this week's episode Bill and Dan chat with Linn from Dare To Struggle Film Festival. They are also met with a connundrum for this week's Scallywag.
Interview starts at 17:19
12 April 2022
This week we talk to Alison from the Brisbane Labour History Association about the fight in the 70s to protect the Great Barrier Reef from mining. This fight was an early example of solidarity between environmental groups and unions, as well as unions taking industrial action to protect the environment.
Interview begins at 7:29
15 March 2022
This week we talked to Trent from Last Quokka, an anti-fascist punk band "from the most isolated city on the planet" about their music, their politics, and their (at the time) upcoming tour.
Interview starts at 29:11
Outro song: Colony by Last Quokka
8 March 2022
This week we talked to Decrim QLD about the struggle to decriminalise sex work in Queensland and the problems facing sex workers in the current system.
Interview starts at 38:45
1 March 2022
This week we talk to Jeff Rickertt from the Brisbane Labour History Association. In the leadup to International Working Women's Day we talked about the campaigns of the telephonists' union in the 1970s and 80s. Telephonists were the workers, mostly women, who operated the manual telephone exchanges across Australia for the Postmaster General's Department (PMG), the largest of all Commonwealth departments in its day. In the 1980s the telecommunications division of PMG became Telecom and was then privatised and renamed Telstra.
Until their jobs were destroyed by automation, the telephonists comprised one of the largest groups of women workers in Australia, and in the 1970s and early 1980s they and their union, the Australian Telephone and Phonogram Officers Association, emerged as one of the most militant public service unions in the country. Here in Meanjin they waged some truly amazing battles that really rattled the bosses.
Interview begins at 34:40
22 February 2022
This week we talk to Virginia Clarke from the Brisbane Labour History Association. Virginia has had a lifetime of rank-and-file activism in unions and the Labor Party. In the late 70s and early 80s Virginia was also involved in the Brisbane punk scene, which, like the punk explosion the world over, was a movement of working class youth. In Brisbane, the punk scene displayed a particularly sharp edge due to Queensland's cultural and political conservatism and the behaviour of the cops who were notorious for meting out 'special treatment' to punks, First Nations people and anyone who publicly expressed dissent. During this turbulent time Virginia found herself enrolled in a degree at UQ, where she found the middle class culture of higher education and student life alienating. For working class students like Virginia, punk identity became a source of strength and up-yours confidence.
Outro song: Pig City by The Parameters