"Australia’s most evil and repugnant nightspot” Foco Club and transnational politics in Brisbane’s ‘68’

Abstract

This paper locates Brisbane – traditionally seen as a backwater both politically and culturally – within the transnational flows of people, ideas and actions which constituted global sixties activism. Host to a wide assortment of youth dissidents, Brisbane provided a plethora of streets and spaces in which activists became part of an imagined community of global revolt. Through investigating such locations, ranging from cultural centres such as the disco-cum-movie and poetry spot Foco Club to bookshops like Red and Black, radicals are revealed as engaging in a sophisticated and globally conscious urban politics of occupation and creative transformation – seeking to invent a differentially youthful social geography and everyday life in the face of overt hostility from the establishment. © 2011 The University of Queenslan