Is the F-word offensive in Queensland? The tiny record shop that answered that question in court – and changed the law

The Guardian

5 days ago

It was one of the first odd, angry shots fired in what we now know as the culture wars. On the morning of 14 February 1989, a plain-clothed officer from Queensland police's licensing branch was sniffing around Rocking Horse Records in Brisbane. He asked the owner, Warwick Vere, if he had any rude records that might be suitable for a 'wild Valentine's Day party'.
A couple of hours later, farcical scenes ensued as four uniformed police raided the store, seizing suggestively titled records and tapes by (among others) Sydney punk band the Hard-Ons, Guns N' Roses' blockbuster album Appetite for Destruction and – most tellingly – a number of items by San Francisco satirists the Dead Kennedys.
Vere was subsequently charged under the Vagrants, Gaming and Other Offences Act for exhibiting and selling obscene material. To this day, Vere remains incredulous. 'It was like they'd just gone through the handbook of far-right Christian groups from America,' he says.
Rocking Horse has just turned 50. After Perth's Dada (est 1971), it is the oldest independent record store in Australia. Originally a tiny space in an Adelaide Street arcade, the shop has since moved several times – expanding, contracting and nearly going broke, before surfing the vinyl revival all the way to its current premises on Albert Street in the heart of Brisbane. Over the journey, it's been a meeting place for young musicians, a local lurk for generations of collectors and – during the 70s and 80s – a countercultural beacon during the repressive Bjelke-Petersen years.
By 1989, though, Bjelke-Petersen was gone – forced out by the ruling National party as the Fitzgerald inquiry into police corruption engulfed the state government. On the ropes, it was mounting a fire-and-brimstone campaign to save the state from a multitude of sins – including by subjecting 'pornographic' rock music to the state's strict censorship laws.
Like all good culture wars, it was imported from the US. In 1985, Tipper Gore (the then wife of future presidential candidate and environmental campaigner Al Gore) had brought home a copy of Prince's Purple Rain for her 11-year-old daughter, only to be whipped into a foam of moral panic by a reference to masturbation in His Purpleness's song Darling Nikki.
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Along with a number of other politicians' wives, Gore formed the Parents Music Resource Centre, which succeeded in convincing the record industry to introduce advisory warnings of explicit content in music. Notable opponents of the PMRC at the time included Frank Zappa, John Denver, Twisted Sister's Dee Snider and the Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra.
Biafra was a persistent thorn in the side – and a target – of America's self-proclaimed Moral Majority. In 1986, he himself became the subject of an obscenity prosecution when the PMRC made a complaint about a poster by the acclaimed Swiss artist HR Giger, which was included in the Dead Kennedys' third album Frankenchrist. The subsequent trial nearly drove Biafra into bankruptcy.
The Dead Kennedys also had an esteemed place in Brisbane's punk history. In 1983, on the band's first Australian tour, drummer DH Peligro was arrested after their show at Festival Hall. Biafra later told American fanzine Maximumrocknroll that 'I felt safer walking around the streets of East Berlin than I did in Brisbane'.
In Rocking Horse's case, Queensland police were acting on a complaint by a local Pentecostal preacher, John Pasterkamp. 'They sent a poor old detective in who later told me that they didn't really want to do it,' Vere remembers. 'But because it was going to be an election issue, they weren't about to give me any latitude.'
Pasterkamp, too, had form. He'd already theatrically destroyed a copy of the Dead Kennedys' In God We Trust EP for the benefit of news cameras. He'd also appeared on A Current Affair, all het up about the Painters & Dockers song Kill Kill Kill – not realising it was a cover of a song that originally appeared on Get Smart. Host Jana Wendt tried not to laugh at him.
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The seizure of the Gunners' Appetite for Destruction, however, delighted Vere. The album was available everywhere, raising the obvious question of why an independent record store was being targeted. 'I then engaged Warner and various other record companies to say to them, 'Well, this is your fight, as well as my fight',' he says. Money poured in for his legal defence.
Nothing from Appetite for Destruction featured in Vere's trial in May 1989, though. At the centre of the case were two songs by the Dead Kennedys: Too Drunk to Fuck and I Kill Children. The surreal trial marked a turning point in Queensland history: the case hinged on whether or not the word 'fuck' could still be regarded as obscene by the average Queenslander at the time.
And so the courtroom was repeatedly regaled with the delightful strains of Too Drunk to Fuck – to the evident despair of the magistrate, Don Fardon, who later noted in his judgment that the song 'repeats those same words monotonously, over and over, concluding with a sound I think intended to imitate vomiting'.
Vere's counsel argued that community standards had changed by drawing on other contemporary examples of film and literature from the era. 'We went to see the Academy Award-winning movie of the year, which was Rain Man. That had 17 'fucks' in it!' Vere says. 'So we basically painted the magistrate into a corner, saying if he was going to convict us, all this other stuff would have to be banned as well.'
As for I Kill Children, Vere says, 'It's a satire, and they didn't go beyond the title. We compared it to Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, where he describes how to bake Irish babies for the English table and the best way to baste them. It was just nonsense.'
Fardon – who had just found comedian Rodney Rude guilty of using offensive language – was forced to admit that 'amongst men in men-only situations its use is such that [fuck] is quite a common word, sometimes it amounts to every second word, and little or no objection seems to arise from it. It may well be the same at women's-only gatherings, but I don't know about that … In this community today, I think the word itself has well and truly ceased to shock or alarm even the tenderest of feelings if it is used with some circumspection.'
The charges were dismissed. The National party government was banished to the political wilderness six months later, and everything in Brisbane, and Queensland, began to change. But Rocking Horse Records has survived. Taking pride of place above the counter is a coat of arms bearing the copy of In God We Trust, Inc torn in half by Pasterkamp – and signed by Biafra.