By Iain McIntyre.
Unemployed activists across Victoria were severely repressed by police and right-wing paramilitaries from the beginning of the Great Depression. The head of police General Thomas Blamey, who was also the leader of the quasi-fascist White Army, used the Political Squad to violently break up street meetings and protests. Forced out of speaking pitches in the city activists continued to hold large meetings in the suburbs. In response hundreds were arrested on trumped up charges of vagrancy and resisting arrest. At one point the Unemployed Workers Movement boasted that it had enough members locked up in Pentridge Gaol to form a reading group.
The biggest free speech battle of the decade took place in Phoenix Street, Brunswick during 1932 and 1933. Unlike most local authorities the Brunswick council refused to bow to police pressure and ban the public meetings that had been regularly taking place there since the First World War. In response the police took matters into their own hands and began arresting speakers under obscure traffic regulations concerning ‘potential obstruction.’ ‘Potential’ was the key word because Phoenix Street was, as it is now, a dead end that no one ever drove down on a Friday night when the meetings took place.
Initial resistance by speakers and the hundreds who would gather to hear them began in 1932 and turned into a full scale campaign of civil disobedience in February 1933. After scores of orators, including leading trade unionists and ALP politicians, were arrested the state government agreed to amend the traffic legislation to properly define ‘obstruction.’ They also requested that the police simmer down, but Blamey refused to do. Instead he ordered his officers to deliberately drive cars up and down Phoenix street in order to justify further arrests.
Faced with mounted and uniformed police local radicals decided to up the ante in May 1933. While a decoy, ‘Shorty’ Patullo, kept police busy by delivering a speech from the top of a tram, activists carefully wheeled a lorry into Sydney Road. After Patullo was shot in the leg by members of the Riot Squad, a hessian cover was pulled from the lorry to reveal local artist Noel Counihan. Counihan stood inside a steel mesh lift bolted to the wagon, and with the use of a gramophone horn, addressed the crowd for 25 minutes on the importance of free speech as well as any other topic that came to mind. Laughing at forlorn attempts by the police to crack him out of the cage, the assembled crowd of thousands took to counting the police out boxing style.
Having made his point and worried that a battering ram wielded by the Riot Squad would hit him in the stomach Counihan eventually surrendered. Although Patullo was to serve a month in jail and Counihan was given a heavy fine (later overturned on appeal) the protest not only humiliated the police, but forced the government to rein in their excesses. In August the Street Meetings Act was passed. The police continued to use other laws to harass meetings and marches in various parts of the city, but following their defeat in May they backed off in Brunswick. A plain clothes policeman visited local activist Les Barnes shortly after Counihan’s speech to let him know that they would no longer interfere with meetings in Phoenix Street.