Midnight Madness: The Belle Vue

At twenty past midnight on Saturday 21 April 1979, demolition equipment pulled up at the William Street entrance of the Belle Vue Hotel, at the parliamentary end of George Street in Brisbane. About two hundred people were already waiting for it. Within ten minutes the police had cordoned off the block between Margaret, Alice and William Streets; as the radio stations spread the news the crowd grew to more than three hundred; and at thirteen minutes past one the machines moved in through them.¹ By the time most of Brisbane woke, the building that had closed the corner opposite Parliament House for ninety-three years was coming down. The demolishers said afterwards that they had been told to have it on the ground within two days. They did it in twenty-three hours.²

This is the demolition Queensland remembers, and it has been remembered in a particular way: as an outrage, a single night's work by a Premier who had stopped caring what anybody thought. That is true as far as it goes. What the record shows is something more deliberate and, for the purposes of this book, more useful. The Government had owned the Belle Vue for twelve years. It announced on the day it bought the hotel that the hotel would eventually be demolished. Everything that happened between August 1967 and April 1979 — the offers, the reprieve, the party-room motion, the promise to rebuild the facade — happened inside a decision that had already been taken. The night was only the part that could not be done in daylight.

I. The corner

The Belle Vue was built in 1886 on the corner of George and Alice Streets, facing the Botanic Gardens.³ Across George Street stood the new premises of the Queensland Club, in the Italianate manner the boom of the 1880s ran to; on the other corner was Parliament House, begun in 1865. In 1890 a terrace of six houses, the Mansions, went up beside the hotel and was let to surgeons, physicians and dentists, a day school and a boarding house. With first Government House a short walk away, the buildings made a group raised within the first three decades of the colony's separate existence, each designed with an eye to those already standing: government, society, commerce and recreation in the space of a city block.⁴

The hotel was the cheapest of them, and it hid the fact handsomely. It was rendered brick, with roof turrets to answer those of Parliament House, and over the plain walls went tiers of verandah clothed in cast-iron lace. A guide of 1888 placed it "among the most favoured of Brisbane hostelries".⁴ For the next eighty years it was where the city put people it wished to impress. Frank Sinatra stayed there, and Katharine Hepburn, in Brisbane with the Old Vic in 1955.⁵

II. Twelve years

In August 1967 the Coalition Government bought the Belle Vue to lodge twenty-seven country members during sittings. A Liberal backbencher later told the House that the price was $600,000, paid while Mr Bjelke-Petersen was Minister for Works.⁶ The hotel closed to the public and did not reopen; from then on it was a boarding house for parliamentarians, a decent walk from either railway station and further than that from most people's lives. And it was announced at the same time that the building would in due course be demolished, to make room for a high-rise block of government offices.⁷

That sequence is the whole of my argument in this chapter, so I will put it plainly. The demolition was not decided in 1979. It was announced in 1967. What followed was not a process by which a decision was reached. It was the interval between a decision and its execution, and it was managed.

Late in 1973 the Country Party Minister for Works, the Hon A.M. Hodges, refused the National Trust permission to inspect the building — this although the Trust's Queensland President, the Hon J.D. Herbert, sat in the same Cabinet as a Liberal, and although the Liberal Party's own central executive condemned the refusal.⁷ The Trust had classified the hotel as "worthy of preservation" on the ground of its "great historical significance", and the Cabinet knew it, because the classification is recorded in Cabinet's own papers.⁸ Offers arrived. A Brisbane company was prepared to spend $100,000 refurbishing the building as a hotel staff training school. The Commonwealth Minister for Urban and Regional Development, the Hon Tom Uren, supported a National Trust request that Canberra buy it. All of them were declined.⁷

In June 1974 the cast-iron lacework was stripped from the verandahs, and the verandahs themselves were taken down — on the Premier's account, for public safety.⁹ The outcry was large enough that the Government announced a five-year reprieve. Barry Humphries, until then an admirer of the Premier, called it a "cynical technique" and described the method in a sentence that has not needed revising since: "It's been done before … leave the building derelict, never have it painted, strip it of any appearance that might look good and architecturally meritorious, then proceed with the demolition."¹⁰

He was right about the effect, whatever one concludes about the intent. Without its verandahs the Belle Vue was a plain rendered box with turrets, and the member for Callide could tell the House in 1979, accurately enough, that "the only thing of character was the lacework, and that was removed years ago."¹¹ A reprieve of five years, granted in 1974, takes one to 1979. The arithmetic was kept.

The safety argument was not invented for the occasion, and it was older than the 1970s. Four speakers in the debate of 1979 traced it to the Brisbane City Council, whose building by-laws did not allow verandah posts to stand on the footpath, where a vehicle might bring them down. Bob Moore, the Liberal member for Windsor, told the House that a council of an earlier administration had declared the posts a hazard and would not let the licensee restore the building as it stood; that the licensee's only other course was to build a new hotel behind the old one; that the Gair Government had said it would buy the place for a parliamentary precinct instead; and that the Coalition which replaced it eventually did. "The council," Moore said, "did not use an ounce of nous and consider erecting a steel defence rail to save the building in its pristine glory."¹² Brisbane's old corner pubs lost their posted verandahs in the same decades, as photographs from before and after show, and I take the same rule to have been at work. At the Belle Vue it did double service: first as the reason the hotel could not be restored, and then as the reason it could not be kept.

How bad the building was by then is a question on which honest witnesses disagreed, and the disagreement is worth recording rather than resolving. Mark Boughen, an architect with the Department of Works who inspected the hotel shortly before it fell, told me in 2000 that in many places the timber was hollow and the paint was the only thing holding it together; the building, like Parliament House but far worse, was infested with termites, and restoration would have meant replacing every beam in it.¹³ Dr John Lockwood, the Liberal member for Toowoomba North, who had lived in it, told the House that it was a fire trap once the verandahs were gone, that he had shown the press borers at work in the timbers, and that on the occasion of the Queen's visit his wife "had a second-hand shower", the water arriving through the ceiling from the bathroom above.¹⁴ Against them stands Rob Akers, the Liberal member for Pine Rivers and himself an architect, who watched the demolition and told the same House that the machines "had to struggle with it", that the building was "quite safe structurally", and that the reports of rot were the advice of people who had been told what advice to give.¹⁵

I do not think it matters which of them was right, and that is the point. A private company had been willing to take the building on in the early 1970s. If it was beyond saving by 1979, it had become so in the hands of the one owner it had in those twelve years, who had refused to sell it, refused to let the National Trust through the door, removed the features for which it was valued, and never spent the modest sum a fellow Government member thought would have kept it sound.⁶ The Cabinet's own papers put restoration at more than two million dollars and demolition at forty thousand.⁸ The first figure was the bill for a decade of neglect, presented as though somebody else had run it up.

III. The week

By the autumn of 1979 the Premier's view was not in doubt. "It's just a heap of rubble really," he said of the hotel. "There's no way in the world you could do anything other than demolish it."⁸ On 28 March the Courier-Mail carried his opinion under the headline "Bellevue – just a heap of rubbish, Joh". The Department of Works had commissioned a structural report, and the historian who prepared the background paper for the release of the 1979 Cabinet Minutes concluded that the hotel's fate "was already sealed" by it. The newspaper's front page of 18 April nevertheless had "Three options on Bellevue": restoration, retention of the facade, or demolition.¹⁶

On Wednesday 18 April 1979 the joint Government parties met and discussed the Belle Vue at length. Don Lane, then a Liberal backbencher, recorded in his memoirs that the Premier was determined the building should go, and that most of those present knew its interior well enough, having boarded there. A motion drafted by Charles Porter and moved by Dr Llew Edwards, both Liberal Ministers, proposed that after demolition the facade be rebuilt, using as much of the original material as possible, including the lacework. Russ Hinze seconded it. It was carried by a large majority, with three Liberal backbenchers against: Akers, his wife Rosemary Kyburz, and Terry Gygar. Those who voted for it, Lane wrote, went away honestly believing the hotel would stand until the Works Department had produced an acceptable design.¹⁷

It would stand for two more days. On the Thursday afternoon the Works Department telephoned for quotes. It received three. The contract was not advertised. The same day a Cabinet minute authorising $40,000 for the work was walked around the Ministers for signature rather than put to a meeting; the Leader of the Opposition told the House that a number of Liberal Ministers had signed it.¹⁸

Friday's Courier-Mail led with "Union 'patrol' at Belle Vue". Electricity board men had torn up the Alice Street footpath the day before in readiness for disconnection; union leaders walked the pavement outside; the Building Trades Group had declared the hotel black. The same front page reported that Parliament had spent Thursday arguing about a ten-cent rise in the price of bread, and nothing in what the Liberal members said suggests they knew what was to happen across the road within a day. On page three Lane was calling for a national design competition for a precinct building that would incorporate the Belle Vue's facade. The lacework was photographed, intact, in its store beneath the Story Bridge.¹⁹

Inside the Government the day looked different, and we know how it looked because the Minister for Labour Relations later read it into the record. At about nine that morning an officer of the Works Department rang the construction inspectorate to say that the contract had been let to Doug Sim Enterprises Pty Ltd, of Albion, and that the hotel would be demolished by mechanical means at about eleven that night. A senior inspector visited the site at eleven in the morning. The company's written application arrived at three in the afternoon. The chief inspector's approval was issued at half past five.²⁰ The Construction Safety Act required twenty-four hours' written notice of work of that kind. The Government's contractor had given eight hours' notice of an eleven o'clock start, and the Minister told the House he was considering a prosecution.²⁰

Half past five on a Friday is a considered hour. The Leader of the Opposition observed that the approval had come "at a time when it was too late for anyone to organise any public protest", and asked the obvious question: if, as the Government maintained, it was the contractor who had chosen to start at night, who had ordered the police?¹⁸

IV. The night

The crowd that met the trucks was not the crowd the Premier liked to describe. He was in the habit of dismissing demonstrators as radicals and communists, and four of the people on the William Street footpath that night were members of his own Government: Akers, Kyburz, Gygar and Angus Innes, the Liberal member for Sherwood.¹ Akers told the House of "women in evening gowns … and men in suits". He also told it that a thirty-ton truck had driven through them, knocking down a woman and a young policeman, and that more were not run over only because the police shoved people bodily out of its path. Kyburz said the same, and added that Special Branch officers had been mingling with the crowd all night.¹⁵

By daylight there were more than sixty police on the corner and placards reading "Toot to boot Joh" and "Demolish Petersen, not the Belle Vue".¹ Ian Prentice was there, a solicitor and recent President of the Young Liberals who would be elected member for Toowong the following year, and he described to me in 2000 an incident Akers had already set out in Parliament. Councillor Peter Campbell, the Deputy Chairman of Pine Rivers Shire, was refused passage to his car in George Street and walked the long way round. A uniformed sergeant followed him for a quarter of a mile. Akers and Prentice followed the sergeant, who saw them, and were then stopped by a plain-clothes officer from using a footpath others had just been allowed along. When they reached the corner of Alice and George Streets by another route — the one dark spot in the whole distance, Akers noted, under the trees — the councillor was against the fence with police around him. Nothing worse happened, according to Akers, because a woman walking up Alice Street called out, "I saw that."²¹

The Telegraph, on the streets that afternoon, counted two people hurt and nine arrested. One of the injured was a young constable, struck by the low loader that brought the machinery in through a gate topped with barbed wire. The first section of wall came away at half past one, torn out by a tow truck and a cable. It did not go easily: by half past three the crane and steel ropes "had proved too slow" and a ditchdigger was brought up instead, which is some support for Akers. Most of the interior was down by a quarter to nine, with the Alice Street facade still standing. Mrs Kathleen Marshall, who chaired the Restore the Belle Vue Campaign Committee and had wanted the hotel made an arts centre and museum, stood at the gates through the night holding a single candle. It was, she said, "burning for Joh's soul."²²

The affair of the councillor is a small episode and he was not hurt. I include it because of who it happened to. These were not the Government's enemies. They were its own backbenchers and its own party officers, in its own capital, discovering at one in the morning what it was like to be on the other side of it.

Mrs Marshall's committee held its rally outside Old Government House at two that afternoon as planned, while the object of the campaign was still coming down a short walk away.¹ From his home at Kingaroy the Premier said he wanted to congratulate the contractor on a job well done.²³ His answer to the protesters, given to the Telegraph that day, was a question: "Did they want it done in peak hour traffic?"²²

V. "Normal procedure"

On the Monday a spokesman for the Works Department told the Courier-Mail that the contract had not been advertised; that quotes had been invited by telephone on the Thursday afternoon, after Wednesday's party meeting; that three had been received; and that this was "normal procedure". He also admitted that "a higher authority" than the department had directed the work to begin early on Saturday morning, and would neither confirm nor deny that the higher authority was the Premier.²³ Thirty years later, when the Cabinet Minutes were opened, they did not say either: after 17 April they make no mention of the hotel at all, and the archives' own historian wrote that it was "still unclear who made the final decision".¹⁶

The official reason for the hour was traffic. "In conjunction with the contractor," the paper reported, "it was decided to start on Saturday so traffic would not be inconvenienced." The traffic was inconvenienced anyway: a wall of the hotel fell on the signal equipment at Alice and George Streets and put the lights out for days, and the chairman of the City Council's planning and traffic committee, Alderman Ardill, called that "vandalism" and said the Town Clerk would be seeking compensation.²³

It was not normal procedure anywhere else. A glance at the tender notices in the metropolitan newspapers of any other state would have shown governments advertising work of this kind weeks ahead, for the ordinary reasons: so that every firm has a fair chance, the taxpayer gets value, and nobody appears to be favoured. In Queensland a $40,000 contract to destroy the most contested building in the state had been let by telephone in an afternoon. Nor was the firm that won it the firm that did the work. The Minister for Police told the House that the demolishers on the site had been hired on subcontract by Sim Enterprises, and quoted them from that day's Telegraph: "We tendered for the job ourselves, but ours was $2,000 above Sim's $40,000 tender."² They were the Deen Brothers, and it is their name, not Sim's, that Brisbane attached to the night.

The reaction reached parts of Brisbane that reactions did not usually reach. The Anglican Dean, the Very Rev Ian George, said the Government had acted "like a thief in the night". The Courier-Mail, under the heading "The midnight madness", called it "another Queensland act of shame" and "Government by darkness", an addition to "the already long list of 'hill-billy' authoritarian actions that have made this State a national laughing stock"; the paper was careful to say the question went "beyond whether the Belle Vue should or should not have been preserved. Even those not involved have been appalled at the get-rid-of-it quick operation." The Telegraph wrote that "the people feeling sick today include many who genuinely love this city – not trouble makers, not radicals – decent citizens." The President of the National Trust, Mr E.S. Hancock, called it "a sad day when people who are trying to protect our heritage are taken to jail while the vandals who try to destroy it are free."²⁴ A Brisbane architect resigned from the restoration committee of Newstead House, and an artist withdrew from an exhibition held in aid of the Premier's wife's welfare committee. Dr Edwards, the Liberal leader, had been in Perth with the party's state president for a Liberal federal council meeting; he told the Sunday Mail he had not known the contractors were to start that weekend. The Premier was unmoved. Dr Edwards, he told the Courier-Mail, "had signed the document which led to the Belle Vue's destruction", and the Liberals now protesting were "pathetic": "After being party to the decision, they have run away from it. What a laughing stock I would be if I ran away from the decision. I like people who stick and have backbone and courage."²³ On the Monday Terry Gygar resigned as secretary of the joint Government parties.²⁵

It should be said that the Government had defenders and that they were not fools. The Toowoomba Chronicle, though it thought the Premier's style outdated and the want of notice unseemly, reminded its readers that a majority of the party room had voted for demolition and that the hotel might soon have fallen down unaided. A correspondent wrote that hotels like the Belle Vue could be seen in almost any country town. Another, from the Gold Coast, was "appalled at the fuss about a few bricks and mortar and some termite ridden wood" while boatloads of refugees were perishing at sea.²⁶ It is a fair rebuke, and it would apply with equal force to most of what anybody has ever written about a building.

VI. The House

Parliament resumed on Tuesday 24 April, and at 11.18 that morning Gygar moved, by leave and without notice, "That this House condemns the precipitate and unannounced way the demolition of the Bellevue Hotel was commenced on the night of Friday, 20 April 1979." He was at pains to say what the motion was not. It did not complain that the building had been pulled down, which was "an entirely separate issue". It complained of how.²⁷

The debate ran until the evening. An Opposition amendment demanding a full explanation was lost by fifty-four votes to twenty-two, the Liberal backbenchers voting against it.²⁸ Innes said that about half of the hundreds of people who had telephoned him "were not all that concerned about the Bellevue; what upset them was the way in which the Bellevue was demolished", and said of the Premier that "he shows no humility on any occasion; he shows an overbearing arrogance". Dr Norman Scott-Young, the Liberal member for Townsville, said: "We are ruled by autocracy — by Cabinet … It is the road to Moscow in no uncertain manner." Tony Bourke, the Liberal member for Lockyer, who had voted in the party room for demolition, said that the manner of it "will return to haunt the Government". Moore, who defended the purchase — had the Government not bought the hotel in 1967, he said, "it would have been purchased by private enterprise and a highrise building erected on the site" — voted for the motion all the same.²⁹

It was lost, thirty votes to forty-one. Thirteen of the fifteen Liberal backbenchers crossed the floor to vote with the Labor Party against their own Government. The Liberal Ministers, bound by Cabinet solidarity, voted with the Nationals; two of them, Sir William Knox and Charles Porter, were paired and absent.³⁰

So the House declined to condemn it, and that was the end of the matter as far as the constitution was concerned. But a Government had been censured by nearly the whole of its junior partner's backbench, over a building, and the Premier's response was to tell the newspapers, "We're here to govern."²⁵ Four years later the Liberals walked out of the Coalition. The Belle Vue was not why, but it belongs on the list of things that taught them what the partnership was.

VII. What it was for

The office tower was never built.

That is the fact on which I would rest the whole case, if I had to choose one. The site was acquired for a high-rise government building in 1967, cleared for it with police protection in 1979, and then left. The facade the party room had voted to rebuild was not rebuilt, because nothing was built to put it on. When I wrote the first version of this essay in 2000 the corner was still empty, with a small plaque recording the hotel and the uproar. It has since passed into the Queen's Wharf development, whose designers propose to mark the hotel's footprint with a public space and a perforated metal colonnade tracing the line of the verandahs: a drawing of the lacework, in steel, where the lacework was.³¹

There were consequences, and some of them were good. Kathleen Marshall said the committee would now fight for other threatened buildings, and the week's letter-writers had already found one: several pointed out that the Dean who spoke of thieves in the night had a plan of his own, to demolish St Martin's Hospital, the sandstone memorial to the dead of the Great War that stood in the grounds of his Cathedral. St Martin's survived a public campaign and stands today. So does the People's Palace in Ann Street, the Salvation Army's temperance hotel, another building in iron lace, whose future was in doubt when the Army gave up running it that year. Both went onto the Queensland Heritage Register on the day it opened in 1992.³² The Regent's foyers were kept and its auditorium was not, which is a story the Introduction has told and Chapter Ten returns to.

But I do not want to end on the consolations, because the consolations are not what was learned.

The customary account of the Belle Vue is that a bad government did a shameful thing at night and was eventually punished for it. The record supports a different reading. For twelve years everything that a functioning system is supposed to contain was present on that corner: a heritage classification, a National Trust, offers from private buyers, an offer of Commonwealth money, union bans, a campaign committee, a sympathetic press, an architect on the Government's own backbench, a party-room vote, and at the last a debate on the floor of Parliament. Not one of them altered the outcome by a day, except the lacework outcry of 1974, which delayed it by five years and cost the building its verandahs. The decision was made in 1967 and executed in 1979. The interval was theatre, and it was good enough theatre that many of the people performing in it believed, as late as the Wednesday, that the ending was still open.

The tendering process by which the wreckers were engaged, described by the Works Department as normal, was at best a breach of Westminster convention and at worst outright corruption. The hour was worse than either, because the hour was the method. A demolition begun at one in the morning, on an approval issued at half past five the previous evening, is a demolition designed so that nobody with standing to object can reach anybody with power to intervene. It worked. Everybody watched it work.

Three years and six months later, on a ridge at Bowen Hills, the same firm did it again.