Thursday, June 15, 2006
No demos, just shopping and lattes
The Museum of Brisbane (MoB) is small-fry in the global museum stakes.

It's certainly no Guggenheim Bilbao or London Natural History. It doesn’t even compare in stature to the somewhat eclectic Queensland Museum over the river on South Bank.

It sits modestly and unpretentiously on the ground floor and basement of the grandiose sandstone Brisbane City Hall, at the heart of the city on King George Square.

But MoB's size and low profile has provided opportunities for engaging and always slightly edgy exhibitions. The museum is freed from the homogenising drivers of having to try to please everyone. Instead, it can ask some challenging attitudinal questions of its audience: where do you stand on this issue?

Its current exhibition is "Taking to the Streets: Two Decades that Changed Brisbane 1965-19855".

"During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, many thousands of people took to the streets in Brisbane to participate in marches, demonstrations and rallies. These were dramatic events with impassioned speeches, chanted slogans and songs and violent interactions with police, often ending in mass arrests..

Who was this crowd? It was leaders, organisers, followers.. even accidental participants."

MoB has brought together the stories, court lists, newspaper cuttings, banners, tee-shirts and the sounds of the era: the "Joh Must Go" marches, the anti-Apartheid rallies which accompanied the touring (white) Springboks, the satirical "Welcome to the Sunshine State" postcards decrying Queensland's famed police brutality and political corruption and the fight for Aboriginal suffrage, for so long opposed in the State.

Many of the exhibits feature King George Square as a seething mass of body politic. It has been the activist heart of Brisbane; where the demos go when they've got something to say.

Inside the foyer of City Hall, adjacent to the MoB is another, smaller exhibition. This one shows-off the six short-listed concept plans for the redevelopment of King George Square.

There are glistening, multi-coloured sunshades, futuristic spaceship- (or sausage-) shaped buildings, gleaming glass towers and ultra-efficient people-movers which can quickly deliver passengers to the new underground bus station. And everywhere is retail, catering and entertainment 'opportunities'. Speaker's Corner is gone completely.

It seems King George Square is to be transformed into just another shopping mall; just like you can find at any international airport or gentrified 'urban renewal' scheme.

Ironic then, that at the same time MoB is exhibiting "Taking to the Streets" we are considering architectural designs that turn King George Square into just another outlet for lattés and Gucci handbags.

Brisbane and Queensland are still slowly shrugging-off the "Wowser" association, that socially conservative, developmentalist, pious and essentially bigoted political expression of the likes of former Premier Bjelke-Petersen.

And while Brisbane’s activist social history may not have the pedigree of Paris, Petersburg or Athens, it is rich and hard-fought, forged in opposition to past draconian restrictions on civil rights, overt racism, brazen political corruption, heritage destruction and rampant environmental over-exploitation

Today, while some of the issues may have changed, the will of a mass of people to demand change by taking to the streets has not abated. This was emphatically demonstrated by this year’s huge Labor Day march, galvanised in opposition to John Howard’s (federal) government’s insurrection, by passing workplace relations laws over and above the States, and unleashing US-style labour market reforms in its WorkChoices legislation.

The architectural firms, which have been short-listed, have not recognised King George Square as the city’s political heart. Inevitably this piece of prime real estate will be ‘developed’ as another revenue-raising space, where room for demonstrations, rallies and impassioned speeches is pushed aside to make way for sounds of electronic cash-tills.

Indeed, maybe we have reached the “End of History”, which Francis Fukuyama predicted we had reached 15 years ago. There is now nothing left to demonstrate against, so we may as well all go shopping.

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