Pig City chronicles a brief yet transformative period of Brisbane life, from the 70s through to the 90s, but this is no ordinary history book. The story is told mainly through the lens of music and politics and shows how the two influenced each other in a time when Brisbane was still coming of age. The ‘BrisVegas’ tag jokingly likens the country town where there’s not much to do (as Brisbane was up until the late eighties) with Las Vegas.
Beginning in the seventies, the books shows how punk dominated the music scene while the ‘pigs’ dominated the punks. (Well, they tried to, anyway…) Corruption was rife among the police and politicians – the conservative governing Country/National party drawing the electoral boundaries and apportioning votes to suit themselves was just the tip of the rotten iceberg. (Iceberg being the only kind of lettuce you could get in Brisbane until about 1990!) Protest marches were banned and police regularly waited around outside gigs to brutalise and arrest musicians and fans, usually on trumped up charges.
Read the rest of this review on my blog: shereads