This is an important read. I care about UQP because I did my undergrad, honours, and masters research degree at UQ, and UQP was a big part of our day to day. Our teachers and colleagues were published there, we worked there, and we hoped to be published there.
When I was a student at UQ, the English department was politically active. That meant that staff and students were involved in strikes and rallies (on campus and off), we had an active postgraduate group (of which I was on the exec for a couple of years), and staff came to hear postgraduates present papers on their research. And they engaged with them. All these people were published authors, experienced speakers, or aspiring authors and speakers. To participate in public ‘intellectualism’ was an expected part of academic life for all of us. And it was fun.
And when I say politically active, I mean that my colleagues were involved in social justice issues. Sure, there were political party memberships, but group membership was more effectively grounded in unions and grass root community action groups. As postgrads we worked for and published in feminist journals like Hecate, we created our own feminist reading and writing groups, and I dealt with my first report of sexual harassment. Because I was surrounded by active feminist academics, I knew where I should start. That time truly shaped me, as a feminist and activist, but also as a thinker and writer in community.
Because we were in the university in the early 1990s, the years immediately after Bjelke-Peterson’s reign of corruption and suppression (1968-1987), we were all personally acquainted with the reality of oppressive and corrupt governments. We’d either been beaten up by the cops, or knew someone who had been. We knew which GPs would help you get a safe abortion. And we knew where to get a drink after 6pm on a weekday.
We took rallies and protests seriously. Writing about power and community was central to the work of many of us. Even if we’d wanted to stay quietly busy in middle class academia, Joh’s government had reached all of us in one way or another. We’d have laughed about the phrase ‘social cohesion’, because one of the things we did best was argue and disagree. But I also remember two of the fiercest combatants crying and embracing each other when we had news of a student’s death.
The Queensland government’s recent outlawing of the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ smells like the dark old days of the deep north. Not because it’s ostensibly about banning hate speech, but because it is clearly and actually about banning criticism of the government, and of genocide. It seems ridiculous to write that a government would outlaw criticism of genocide. But that is the white Queensland way, with its long and bitter history of Blak massacre and cultural oppression.
Jazz Money is an Aboriginal Australian, and halting publication of her book because of her position on colonial genocide is really just another version of familiar Queensland policy. The decline of UQP as a site (or the idea of a site) for political expression and exploration makes me sad. While it was the organ of a white, patriarchal institution, it still published people who were not white, not straight, and not at all interested in supporting patriarchy. I guess those days are over.