A re-recording of Amy McQuire's speech from the Justice for Palestine Rally on Sunday 12th November

Amy McQuire - Re-recording of speech from Justice for Palestine Rally - Sunday 12 November

Live recording from the Justice for Palestine Rally - Sunday 5th November.

Abdullah speaking at the Justice For Palestine Rally, Sunday 5 November

A recording of the Housing Justice in Unjust Cities Forum, held in so-called brisbane in September 2021. The Forum features a panel discussion and Q&A session. The panellists were Uncle Dr Shane Coghill, Professor Chelsea Watego, Samantha Bond, and
Kevin Yow Yeh, and the panel was facilitated by Natalie Osborne, and introduced by Jonathan Sriranganathan and Mo Chan.

Housing Justice In Unjust Cities Forum

Anna and Marissa in conversation with Witt Gorrie explore the relationship between housing injustice, colonisation, and the prison industrial complex. Witt (they/he) is a trans social worker and organiser based in Naarm/Melbourne. We discuss Witt’s work on Beyond Bricks & Bars, the Trans and Gender Diverse Decarceration Project based at Flat Out. We discuss the transphobic, carceral and colonial logics that intersect to see high rates of trans and gender diverse people in prison, especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander trans women in men’s prisons, and what this means for housing justice. 

This was first broadcast as an episode of Radio Reversal on 4ZZZ 102.1FM, on 23 September 2021

Radio Reversal

Interview with Witt Gorrie

The Radio Reversal collective is a long-standing audio collective based in so-called brisbane. Since 2012, we have been producing and presenting a weekly, research- and interview-based live radio show on community radio station 4zzz (102.1fm). As a collective, we come together around a shared vision of anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-ableist, abolitionist, Indigenist, queer feminist political education. We are committed to using the tools of audio production and storytelling to platform and amplify grassroots community organising, critical theorising, and political art, music, and activism.

After many years of making live radio, we see the podcast as a chance to deepen and extend our existing on-air radio work by re-composing materials in themed ‘seasons’, to help us draw out key insights and reflect on what we’ve learned. In these first couple of episodes, we’re going meta: digging into the why of this new podcast project, and what listeners can expect from the Radio Reversal Podcast.

Over the course of this episode, you’ll hear us talk a bit about the broader “pedagogy” of Radio Reversal - that is, how we understand our experiences of teaching and learning through radio-making. For some bigger reflections on pedagogy and what it means to think about it beyond traditional ideas of education, we recommend digging into: Paulo Freire's landmark "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and bell hooks extraordinary “Teaching to Transgress”, both of which we discuss in passing in this episode. We also allude to some of the ways that traditions of abolitionist organising and theorising have shaped our approaches, which you can follow up by digging into Dylan Rodriguez’s excellent piece here. If you listen especially carefully to the podcast (ha!) you’ll also hear Shreya mention a wonderful piece by Radio Reversal co-founder Fern Thompsett and her comrade Eli Meyerhoff on “militant co-research” and the possibilities of free education projects that stand in uncompromising solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty. This work in turn references this extraordinary piece by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on “Land as Pedagogy”. You can also check out some of Eli’s longer work in his wonderful book “Beyond Education: Radical Studying for another world.”

In the context of these conversations on pedagogy, we also talk about some of the companion projects of Radio Reversal, including the Brisbane Free University. Many of the regular producers of the Radio Reversal podcast also come together as participants and organisers of the Brisbane Free University Radical Reading Group, which meets fortnightly to discuss a variety of texts that help us to navigate the political questions of the present conjuncture. If you’re interested in getting involved with the thinking and organising we do through the free university, please get in touch!

Episode 1 - Introducing the Radio Reversal Podcast

In this first episode, we draw together speeches, interviews, public discussions and readings, to get a sense of what has been happening in Gaza since October 2023, and the relationship between the current atrocities and a much longer history of Israeli settler colonialism. We end the episode with a special reading from Dr. Jamal Nabulsi’s incisive 2021 essay Righting the History of Palestine (available here), to better understand the historical conditions that have created the conditions for genocide in the present, and to foreground the powerful and continuing history of Palestinian resistance.

Like most of the episodes in this series, this carries a strong content warning for graphic descriptions of genocide, war crimes, racial violence, gendered and sexual violence. If any of this content is likely to be triggering, we recommend that you make a plan for supporting yourself in advance, including making sure you have friends or family to call if you need help or care, or contacting services like Lifeline (13 11 14) for free, anonymous counselling support.

In this episode, you’ll hear from staunch Palestinian organisers and community members, including (in order) Khawla, Malaak, Remah, Hidaya, Zayd, Jamal and Muntaser. You’ll also hear from Muslim comrade and organiser Binil, and Radio Reversal producer Anna.

If you’d like to access the full audio archive of the Justice for Palestine Magandjin struggle, please get in touch with us via substack and we’ll organise access to anything you need.

The central purpose of this podcast is to honour the power of Palestinian resistance in this moment, and to learn from the struggle as it unfolds here in Magandjin. If you’re listening in and you’re not yet involved in the Justice for Palestine Magandjin movement, please consider signing up to our mailing list so that you can get up to date details about upcoming events, calls-to-action, and ways to support the movement for Palestine. You can also follow us on facebook, instagram and twitter to stay up to date. You can also follow the amazing work of Queensland Muslim Incorporated, and campaigns directly targeting the expansion of the weapons industry here in so-called queensland, including Shut Down Ferra and Wage Peace.

If you’re listening in from further afield, we suggest following the incredible work of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) to keep up to date with organising happening in your area.

We also encourage everyone who is getting involved in the struggle for justice for Palestine to also recognise the intimate connections between settler colonialism and racial violence in Palestine and the continuing violence of occupation on this continent. There is a rich and powerful tradition of Blackfulla Palestinian solidarity in this place, which you can trace here and here.

We also encourage listeners to get involved with and support campaigns against settler colonial violence on this continent, including the work of the Black People’s Union, Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, Stop Blak Deaths in Custody, Treaty Before Voice, the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy, and independent Black media sites like Amy McQuire’s incredible substack, Black Justice Journalism.

Solidarity with all Indigenous peoples’ globally struggling against injustice, extraction, occupation, and oppression.

Episode 4 Genocide & Settler Colonialism

If you’ve been following the Justice for Palestine movement, you’ll know that there’s been a lot happening here in so-called brisbane over the past few weeks, mirroring a massive upsurge in Palestinian justice organising globally. From the extraordinary encampments being established by students on university campuses across the globe (including the University of Queensland, here in so-called brisbane); to growing union solidarity movements pushing for work stoppages at export ports, construction sites and factories; to the freedom flotilla desperately working to find ways to provide direct aid to the people of Gaza; and the many countless discussions, meetings, pickets, teach-ins, rallies, and blockades happening across the world: work is happening on every horizon, and there’s more still to come.

This week, we look at another key site in the global movement for freedom and justice: the military industrial complex and the global weapons trade. RR producer Roshan draws together speeches from protests and blockades, pre-recorded discussions and older interviews and recordings that focus on weapons manufacturing, development and trade. Through these speeches and interviews, we learn about some of the ways that australian companies are directly supporting the continuing genocide in Gaza (and West Papua, as well as the continuing targeting of First Nations people on this continent), and the role that the australian government is playing in exporting weapons and components to support Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

We also hear a lot in this episode from activists and organisers who are working to directly challenge companies implicated in the genocide in Gaza, including Ferra Engineering in Tingalpa, who are responsible for manufacturing the component of the F-35 bomber jets that enables them to drop bombs. Ferra Engineering is one of the key targets at the moment, given their role in providing essential components to some of the world’s largest military aerospace companies including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon. But Ferra Engineering are not the only company implicated in the military industrial complex in so-called Brisbane. Companies like Heat Treatment Australia, or HTA, in Coopers Plains; L3 Micreo in Eight Mile Plains; G&O Kert in Acacia Ridge; and TAE Aerospace in Bundamba, Ipswich, are all deeply implicated in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

You’ll also be hearing excerpts from an incredibly insightful discussion between Palestinian organiser Amal Naser and Greens Senator for New South Wales, David Shoebridge, which we are grateful to be able to share with you all. We strongly recommend that you go and watch the rest of that discussion here. In Amal & David’s conversation, they dig into some of the fundamental challenges of examining the military industrial complex in so-called australia, and the damning lack of transparency around weapons exports and imports in this country. 

Episode 11 Weapons, war & the military industrial complex

Welcome to a new series of the Radio Reversal Podcast - this one focussed on Crisis, Disaster & Collective Futures! 

Like a lot of people, we've been thinking a lot about disaster, crisis, climate change, community-based responses this week, in the aftermath of Cyclone Alfred here in Magan-djin, so-called brisbane. In case you somehow missed it - South East Queensland was struck by its first cyclone in 50 years over the weekend, and while the cell technically weakened to a tropical low before it crossed the coast near Redcliffe, residents still reported wind gusts of over 110 kph on the coast. In addition to the wild winds, the cyclone also brought massive amounts of rain to the region, including falls of over 300mm in a single day. This led, predictably, to major flash flooding across the city, compounding the damaging impacts of the wind and subsequent coastal erosion.

In this first episode, we’re looking back at Cyclone Alfred and some of the ways that communities responded to, prepared for, and theorised their experiences of the crisis. First up, we’re reflecting on the ways that governments and corporations make use of disasters like Cyclone Alfred to push through repressive and dangerous legislation. Just today, we saw the LNP Lord Mayor of so-called brisbane, Adrian Schrinner, announce plans for emergency evictions of people who have been sleeping rough in parks across the city - despite the fact that there is no affordable, appropriate accommodation. There’s been a lot of disingenuous claims made by the Lord Mayor in announcing these measures - including the claim that everyone sleeping rough in the city has been offered alternative accommodation and turned it down in favour of staying in the park. But what’s clear already is that the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Alfred has created an ideal backdrop for the city council to push ahead with their plan to fully dismantle all of the communities that have - by necessity - taken up residence in parks across the city. This is an absolutely horrific example of a government utilising an environmental disaster to expand systems of control and repression under the guise of “public safety” and “protection.”

Next up in this week’s episode, we’re looking towards more optimistic horizons - catching up with our good friend and climate comrade, Moira Williams, who is a long-term activist and advocate with Move Beyond Coal. In a short phone interview, Moira shares some of her reflections and insights into the importance of local and community based organising and support networks during times of disaster, and how those networks might work alongside broader political campaigns to challenge those responsible for the ongoing threat of climate collapse.

If you are feeling politically frustrated by the failures of governments and corporations to take the risk of climate collapse seriously, get along to the upcoming Cyclone Speak Out at Speakers Corner outside the Queensland Parliament next Thursday 20th March from 10am. You’ll hear from communities directly impacted by Cyclone Alfred, as well as organisers working towards climate justice in a variety of different ways. And a reminder that you can also head along to the regular protests outside the Boeing headquarters at 123 Albert St (cnr Charlotte St) in the city from 12noon on Wednesdays. The global weapons trade and military industries are both major contributors to carbon emissions across the globe. As our comrade Remah Naji explains: “A couple of years ago, a report revealed that if the world’s militaries were treated as a single nation, they would rank fourth in carbon emissions - just behind China, the USA and India, but ahead of Russia. This puts military-related fossil fuel emissions above both the aviation and shipping industries combined.”

Episode 12 - After the Flood

We are continuing our series - begun last week on our broadcast show on 4ZZZ and then sent out in our podcast feed - on Disaster, Crisis, and Collective Futures. What is it about disasters that enables us to plan and act together with neighbours and strangers, more collaboratively, more collectively, more generously? How do public and private institutions leverage crises to retain and expand their control, reasserting racial, colonial, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal and ableist imaginaries and practices?

In the wake of Cyclone Alfred, we’ve seen expressions of the former, of practices consistent with ‘disaster communism’ (as we discuss with Nick Southall in this podcast episode!) - neighbours, friends, strangers, coming together to organise and share resources and energy to prepare, survive, and recover from the cyclone and its aftermath. People looked out for each other.

We’ve also, unfortunately, seen expressions of the latter, of practices consistent with ‘disaster capitalism’ - in this instance, Lord Mayor Schrinner using the cover of the disaster to evict rough sleepers from parks, from public spaces, across the city. (Notably, people are not having it, and in the week since Schrinner’s announcement there have been multiple events held and yet more organised that stand in solidarity with unhoused people across this city).

To help us think through all this, we had a chat with Dr Nick Southall, long term community organiser, academic at University of Wollongong, author of the blog ‘revolts now’ and the new book, ‘Disaster Communism and Anarchy in the Streets’.

In this chat we talk about disaster communism as the agonistic opposite to disaster capitalism. We discuss what disaster communism is, and the everyday actions by everyday people that constitute it. We talk about how it is that certain kinds of community relations and modes of organising somehow seem more possible in times of environmental disasters, the importance of fighting to reconfigure our relations to time so we all have more capacity to do the kinds of loving, caring work that can liberate us from racial colonial capitalism, and reflect a little on what our orientation to the State should be.

In future shows we’ll talk more about this last point, and consider the ways that the settler colonial state seeks to coopt, defuse, neutralise, and disband the practices and expressions of disaster communism as they appear, and the implications of that for our organising and resistance. We’ll also talk more about how the solidarities that can form during moments of disaster may be deliberately fractured along the well-worn lines of colonialism, racism, ableism, classism, cisheteropatriarchy, etc., and how we can guard against that.

But in this podcast we want to focus particularly on disaster communism, and the possibilities it attunes us to. We want to attend to what’s just happened, and acknowledge and learn from this and other examples of emergent organising, and how existing networks and relationships can blossom and expand to meet the scale of the unfolding (poly)crisis.

Episode 13: Disaster Communism with Nick Southall

If you haven’t already listened to the first couple of episodes in this series - never fear! You can jump in fresh here, or head back and listen to Episode 12 - After the Flood & Episode 13 - Disaster Communism with Nick Southall. In these episodes, we chatted about weather events like Cyclone Alfred & what happens during “disasters”: how the parameters of political possibility shift, sometimes incrementally, and sometimes all at once. We talked about two very different expressions of these political ruptures: “disaster capitalism,” where corporations and the state use these events as opportunities to expand state and corporate power and to find new frontiers of capitalist exploitation, and “disaster communism,” in which communities self-organise to support one another, forge networks of mutual aid and care, and build a genuinely radical sense of “class power.”

This week, Nat, Jonno & I (Anna) decided to focus a bit more on the way that these dynamics operate in the specific conditions of settler colonialism, especially here in so-called australia. We’re engaging with these topics as settlers, living uninvited on unceded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands, and this is perhaps part of why we are so interested in the way that crises operate as key moments in which settlers are brought into new forms of colonial complicity. In particular, we are digging into a concept that we’ve been talking about for a few years now: the idea of “crisis colonialism.” We use this as a shorthand way to think about how settler colonial states use periods of crisis - economic depressions, world wars, ecological disasters - as fuel for settler colonial nation-building.

In listening back to and editing this week’s episode, I realised (largely thanks to a generative conversation with Dr. Jamal Nabulsi) that a lot of what we’re thinking about in this episode is affect - how people feel during crises, and how those collective emotions are operationalised and weaponised for a variety of political projects. Affect is central to understanding both "the shock doctrine", as Naomi Klein theorises it, and “disaster communism” as described by Nick Southall, which we dig into in more detail at the beginning of this episode. And affect is also an important part of our analysis of “crisis colonialism,” and especially the way that settler colonies use moments of crisis to manufacture and secure settler consent for colonial governance through a rotating set of strategies, ranging from fear-based moral panics through to the "positive" construction of ideas of “mateship”, the fair go, and "pioneering spirit".

So in this week’s episode, we’re looking closer at these dynamics. How exactly do settler colonial states take advantage of periods of crisis? How do these moments become repurposed as fuel for nation-building? How does “securitisation” and policing fit into this process? And as settlers who are engaged in communities of struggle and committed to disrupting settler colonialism… how can we ensure that our collective efforts in these moments don’t become fuel for the colonial project that caused the crisis in the first place?

We end this episode with some reflections on how we can build our collective ability to resist colonial complicity: how to refuse the promise of liberal reform; how to reject all attempts to narrow our care, grief and rage to those deemed “grievable” by the colonial state; and how we might work to align ourselves instead with everyone, everywhere, who is fighting to dismantle the colonial capitalist death machinery that causes the “permanent crisis” of the present.

Episode 14: "Crisis Colonialism" & the expanding frontiers of empire

We’re back with another episode in our running series on Disasters, Crisis, and Collective Futures - this time looking at the “slow violence” of environmental disasters and degradation, the links between this violence and settler-colonialism, and the long standing practices of Aboriginal refusal and resistance against the crisis conditions of colonialism.
 
Something we’ve talked a bit about in this series is that crises, disasters, are not evenly distributed. Some people are far more frequently faced with disaster conditions - often as a result of state violence and neglect, capitalist exploitation, (and the “externalities” resulting from those activities), and because of the ongoing violence of settler-colonialism.

For those of us who tend to experience disasters as short, sharp, and intermittent or rare shocks, it’s important to consider what the uneven distribution of disasters and crises tells us about the material realities of colonialism and capitalism; and how we can be in solidarity with people more regularly exposed to disasters, including people who’ve been doing the work of fighting for kin and Country and justice, and fighting against the forces of colonialism and capitalism, for hundreds of years.

To help us think these things through, we could not be more delighted than to be bringing you this conversation with Rikki Dank, Gudanji and Wakaya woman and one of the directors of Gudanji For Country. Gudanji For Country is a grassroots First Nations organisation working to protect Country from colonial exploitation, overgrazing, mining, and fracking, to educate, advocate, and to create sustainable futures.

This interview with Rikki covers a wide range of topics, including the relationship between the slow violence of environmental degradation and colonialism, the links between climate change and colonial capitalism, the history of damaging, extractive practices on Gudanji Country and across the Beetaloo Basin and elsewhere (from the damage wrought by early colonising pastoralists through to contemporary fracking), and how Aboriginal People have fought and found ways to care for community and Country in defiance of the colonial-capitalist apparatus.

Through this interview, we see the long emergency of colonialism and of climate change, not as something expressed only through short and sharp big events (like Cyclone Alfred), but also through creeping pollution, contamination, degradation, exploitation, displacement, and damage to lifeways. In learning to pay attention to these different temporal expressions of disaster and crisis, we can better learn how to organise ourselves and our struggle as climate change escalates.

Rikki Dank also spoke with us of Indigenous futurities and possibilities, of healing Country, of care, and of love - love as a feeling and as an orientation to the work of struggle, of organising, of activism, of building and maintaining community, of care, of creating possibilities for each other. She speaks of love as a feeling, love as an action, love as the steadfast refusal to be dispossessed by settler-colonialism, or to give up.

(The centrality of love also brought to mind our conversation with Nick Southall about disaster communism a few weeks back - he also spoke of love, and the love of people and for people that helps drive us into and sustain us in struggle).

We hope you enjoy this conversation with the wonderful Rikki Dank, and encourage you to follow her work with Gudanji for Country by signing up to their newsletter, following them on Instagram, and if you can, consider supporting their work through a donation.

Episode 15: Caring for Country against the colonial polycrisis with Rikki Dank

Welcome to another episode of the Radio Reversal podcast, continuing our current series on crisis, disaster & collective futures. This week, we’re turning our attention to the recent federal election here in so-called australia. Last Saturday, roughly 1 in 3 people voted Labor, 1 in 3 voted Liberal/National, and 1 in 3 voted for someone else.

Has anything changed?

With the centre-right-wing Labor party now dominant nationally, what lessons should we take from this election? Is running for elections still worth the time for those of seeking deeper radical change? Where should we all be putting our energy?

In this episode, we talk through some of the initial results from the election, and what we might be able to learn from these trends. With help from Mununjahli and South Sea Islander Professor Chelsea Watego’s new “Let’s Talk Race on the Run” series, we debunk the unhinged-from-reality narrative that this election constituted a “progressive” victory against Trumpism, and work to contextualise the election results in the context of the broader waves of repression that we’re seeing in this moment.

We wade through the mixed results that we saw for the Greens in this election: minor swings against the party in the lower house, an increase in the Senate vote, and some absolutely massive swings towards some key candidates, including our dear friend Remah Naji in Moreton, and Huong Trang in the seat of Fraser. Notably, both of these candidates ran on explicitly pro-Palestine platforms, and both Remah and Huong are actively involved in activism and community organising beyond the Greens. Both the Moreton campaign and the Fraser campaign drew explicit connections in their campaigns between racial justice, environmental justice, housing justice, and anti-colonial solidarity, focusing more directly on discussions around refugee justice, Palestinian liberation, and Land Back for First Nations communities on this continent. Perhaps not coincidentally, Remah & Huong are both the children of refugees: Remah’s family were displaced from Palestine during the 1948 Nakba and she grew up as part of the Palestinian diaspora in Jordan; Huong grew up in the seat of Fraser and describes herself as “the daughter of Vietnamese boat people.” Both Remah & Huong saw significant swings towards them, particularly in the most racially and culturally diverse and working class parts of their electorates.

So - what does this all mean for what’s to come? We end this episode with a generative reminder from local organiser Bec from the Community Union Defence League who are right now organising eviction defence, food support and mutual aid for folks sleeping rough in Musgrave Park. In case you missed it, the Lord Mayor, Adrian Schrinner, announced a couple of weeks ago that they planned to forcefully evict all homeless people from parks across the city on the grounds of “community safety” and “public accessibility”, despite the fact that no suitable housing could be provided to folks sleeping rough. I doubt that it is a coincidence that they decided to move ahead with the evictions only a few days after the federal election, perhaps in the hope that many organisers would be burnt out from the long election campaign. What they didn’t bank on was the scale of popular opposition to these evictions, and this week we’ve seen inspiring solidarity with hundreds turning out early each morning to support folks facing move-on directions, to challenge these evictions, and to refuse to allow this violence to go uncontested.

Episode 16: The Ongoing Crisis (Election Special w Jonathan Sriranganathan)

This week’s episode of the Radio Reversal podcast features an interview with Dr Jeff Rickertt, renowned People’s Historian, for Labour Day 2025. Han speaks with Jeff about histories of labour organising (particularly here in so-called queensland), the early formation of unions, and the tensions and contradictions these movements expressed and revealed regarding race, gender, and colonialism. They spoke also about the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organising, particularly Aboriginal labour strikes as a strategy in anti-colonial struggle, often outside of the systems of mainstream/whitestream organised labour. They explored labour organising as a site of solidarity and transformative politics, discussing some of the recent examples of labour organising against the genocide in Gaza, and how workers have attempted to leverage their collective power to refuse complicity in this genocide.

This is part of our ongoing series on Disasters, Crisis & Collective Futures. The polycrisis shapes and reconfigures the nature of work and working conditions; the possibilities of labour organising to contest the crisis conditions of colonial racial capitalism warrant exploration and action. But organised labour movements can also be sites of liberal reform, sites where (some) workers are strategically drawn back into complicity and cooperation with capital in order to ‘stabilise’ the crisis without addressing the conditions of exploitation and injustice that (re)produce it.

As we face down emboldened fascist movements, growing political repression and overt genocidal violence in Palestine and beyond, we’re looking back to think about the long history of workers organising on this continent, its tensions and contradictions, and what we ought to be doing collectively as workers in this moment.

Episode 17: Labour Day, resistance, complicity & crisis with Dr Jeff Rickertt

In case you missed it, over the weekend, a loose collective of performers, workers and patrons of the Wickham Hotel downed tools and refused to take shifts or perform their sets to protest a decision by Aus Venue Co, the parent company who owns the Wickham Hotel, to book an event hosted by the State Zionist Council of Queensland. For some context: the State Zionist Council of Queensland is a political lobby group set up as an umbrella organisation for other Zionist groups in Queensland with the express purpose “to promote and communicate Israel’s interests within the broader Queensland community and to promote Queensland’s relationship with Israel” as well as “to create an atmosphere within the community that values Zionist thought and expression…and pride in Israel and her achievements.”

To get across the opposition to this group hosting an event at the Wickham Hotel, we catch up with drag performer and artist Lulu LeMan, who stopped her performance on Friday evening at the Wickham in order to join talks with workers and management about the planned picket for Saturday night. We then share a interview from our live show with two of the organisers who helped workers hold a picket on Saturday evening: Oriela, who is a non-binary Lebanese person and a proud disabled dyke, an advocate, and a long-time patron of the Wickham; and Bizzi, who is a Wakka Wakka and Arrendte Burlesque performer and writer with deep ties to the Wickham performance community. We talk about the work that went on behind the scenes to build some momentum for a protest against this booking, and in opposition to this exploitative use of a beloved queer venue to pinkwash an event hosted by a Zionist political lobby group. 

If you’re not familiar with the term, Dean Spade explains that pinkwashing is: “a term activists have coined for when countries engaged in terrible human rights violations promote themselves as “gay friendly” to divert attention from terrible human rights violations, in this case diverting attention from the brutal colonization of Palestine. Israel is the country most famous for pinkwashing, engaging it as a strategy in their rebranding campaign for the last decade.”

This particular angle has been largely erased in media commentary about the picket, which, as Oriela and Bizzy explain, was largely focused on challenging the use of an iconic queer venue for this particular State Zionist Council of Queensland event. Another key thread that has been largely ignored by mainstream commentary is the fact that this picket was organised by a collective of workers, patrons and performers and included the incredible decision of workers from the Wickham Hotel deciding to refuse to work if the booking went ahead. To talk about the importance of this action, I catch up with dear friend of Radio Reversal, Ari Russell from Unionists for Palestine, to put this action in the broader context of workers organising against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We talk about how hard it has been for many of us to find ways to leverage our power as workers; and the ongoing struggle to build a sense of collective power in a time of record-low union membership and ineffective trade union bureaucracies.

Episode 18: Refusing to pinkwash a genocide

Today, I’m coming back to the core of this series on crisis, disaster & collective futures to ask: how can we think about the crisis when the crisis is permanent?

As of today, it's 610 days since the Israeli Occupation Forces began their most recent genocidal siege on Gaza. It’s more than 76 years since the Zionist occupation of Palestine began with the events of the Nakba: massacres, displacements and the ethnic cleansing of huge swathes of Palestinian land. It’s 237 years since the first British penal colonies - prisons - were established on the homelands of the Gadigal, Dharug and Dharawal peoples of the Eora Nation. And it’s just over a week since Kumanjayi White, a young Walpiri man who lived with complex disabilities, was killed after being restrained by off-duty cops in Mparrtwe, Alice Springs. And then, just a few days ago, we heard reports of a second Aboriginal death in police custody in the Northern Territory in as many weeks. Kumanjayi White’s death in police custody is the 597th Aboriginal death in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its findings in the 1990s - many of which, as Senator Lidia Thorpe has consistently pointed out in Parliament, are yet to be implemented.

So as we look back at the unending crisis conditions of colonialism, what does it mean for how we look ahead? What does it ask of us - to think about these current atrocities in the context of a much longer, ongoing crisis?

Episode 19: What if the catastrophe has never ended?

This episode* of the Radio Reversal podcast brings together two interviews recorded over the last couple of months digging into the targeting of trans people, especially trans kids, and moral panics about gender and transition here and abroad. The first interview is between Anna and Necho Brocchi, proud trans woman and Service Delivery Coordinator at Open Doors Youth Service, and together they discuss the Crisafulli Government’s ban on puberty blockers for trans youth here in so-called queensland, the Albanese Government’s spurious “review” into gender affirming care, moral panics, and the ways the fight for trans justice is intrinsically tied to other struggles for justice, including prison and police abolition, housing and educational justice, and justice for First Nations People, here and everywhere. In the second interview, Han speaks with Wiradjuri transgender and non-binary academic, Professor Sandy O’Sullivan, about the recent wave of attacks on trans people, including the UK Supreme Court decision and how it threatens the rights and safety of trans people, and they unpack the colonial and white supremacist logics at play in anti-trans movements and the enforcement of the gender binary.

This is part of our ongoing series on crisis, colonialism and collective futures - this time, we’re considering how the confected “crisis” about trans people, their access to gender affirming care, their ability to make decisions about themselves/their identities/their lives, the spaces they have access to, which bathroom they use, and on and on, uses the tools and techniques of moral panic to justify harmful, discriminatory, oppressive, and violent government actions and policies. This confected “crisis” deflects scrutiny from the actual crises facing trans people, like structural discrimination, violence, over-policing, difficulties accessing gender-affirming care or indeed any medical care, issues relating to housing, employment, education, and more.

As we see with other moral panics (e.g. around “youth crime” in so-called queensland), draconinan government actions are authorised by the discourse of “crisis”, and often, these actions are framed in terms of “safety”. Where we’re writing from, so-called queensland, the recent ban on puberty blocking medication for trans youth has been positioned as a matter of safety, as taking precautions, for the kids’ own protection. This is reprehensibly dishonest, given the overwhelming evidence that accessing gender affirming care (including puberty blockers) improves the safety and wellbeing of trans kids. But, for those who don’t know any better, this might seem like a common sense precaution. In other cases, it is cis people whose safety is foregrounded; the recent Supreme Court ruling in the UK (amongst other things) excludes trans people - particularly trans women - from accessing certain single sex segregated spaces, in the name of “protecting” cis women.

Episode 20 Moral panics and the targeting of trans people w Necho Brocchi and Prof Sandy O'Sullivan

The Radio Reversal collective is a long-standing audio collective based in Meanjin, so-called brisbane. We are committed to using the tools of audio production and storytelling to platform and amplify grassroots community organising, critical theorising, & political art, music, and activism. The radio reversal collective is premised on a shared vision of abolitionist, Indigenist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-ableist, queer feminist political education. Radio Reversal is an ongoing experiment in public pedagogy; in thinking and learning out loud, together, over and over again.

Since 2012, we have been producing and presenting a weekly, research- and interview-based live radio show on 4zzz, 102.1fm. Across a variety of formats and timeslots, the live show has continued to anchor the work we do. Live, community radio is at the heart of what we do, and we remain committed to making audio content that is accessible to anyone with a radio and willing ear. 

For over a decade, we've been building an audio archive of struggles for justice and liberation across this city and beyond; a record of the radical theorising, organising, mistake-making, re-thinking, and community building that happens across this city. Here, we hope to slowly share some of that archive, and the lessons we've learned from building it.

RADIO REVERSAL COLLECTIVE: RADICAL AUDIO ARCHIVE

Popular tracks