On 23 January 2006, the US Navy's biggest military vessel, the nuclear powered USS Ronald Reagan, arrived in Brisbane for a five-day visit. With estimates that the 6,000 strong crew would pump around $5 million into the local economy, the media, businesses and politicians welcomed the visit as a fabulous opportunity for the city. The Brisbane Peace Convergence, a coalition of local peace groups, disagreed and attempted a water-borne protest. The police intercepted the flotilla of kayaks and rowboats before they even got close to the USS Ronald Reagan because the entire Brisbane River had been declared an exclusion zone. This action and other acts of public protest in response to the ship's rubbish washing up on the shores of Moreton Bay and the Sunshine Coast were given little press coverage.

I wish I had said that. But it was written in 1988 by Casey Hayden, a female civil rights worker with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or ‘Snick’, in the American South of the mid-1960s, remembering that horrific/heroic time of bombings and burnings. In Brisbane, a distant metropolis on the historical bypass, it was nothing as bad as that. No one was murdered — not right then anyway, though there would also be threats, beatings, bombing and arson attacks (and the odd trashing) of leftist personnel, headquarters and bookshops. There would be moments to be afraid. But there is a purer applicability in Hayden's words to the local experience. For there was indeed a whole country trapped in the lie of Vietnam, of ‘White Australia’, of Aboriginal segregative gulags, of the biological fixity of men's and women's uneven positionings, of the sanctity of an intense moral and political censorship, tighter here than just about anywhere in the West: a place where Anzac ruled, sport and politics never mixed and the yawning gulf between Australian values and Australian practices was rarely noticed. A whole traffic-snarl of lies and deception really, and we were the only truth-tellers as far as we could see.

Beyond just my bias as a participant, I see a need to place the understanding of the innovative and distinctive character of Brisbane protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s on solid analytical foundations. These protests remain excluded from satisfying historical debate: while acknowledged as the product of the Queensland legacy of illiberality (Lunn; Whitton; Fitzgerald 1985, 1986), their connections with broader national and international social movements are largely ignored. This essay provides important details but points to broader reflections as well in its analysis of the civil liberties movement (CLM). My discussion focuses on the period 1965–75 but places the Brisbane protests historically in the general moves for liberalisation in the aftermath of World War II

On 31 March 1965, Ro Bogner and I went into the public bar of the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane's Coronation Drive and tried to order a lemonade each. Because we were women, we were refused and ordered out, but we did not leave. We chained ourselves to the bar rail instead. The barman, then the publican, then police — first uniformed then plain-clothes — tried hard to get us to leave without force. When they failed, they unexpectedly left us to it. At once there followed a storm of publicity, even extending overseas, and public response ranging from passionate support to hostile opposition right through to threats of violence and even death.

Forty-one years later, in the Museum of Brisbane in the City Hall, I saw photos, press clippings and texts about this first, and subsequent, demonstrations in the campaign to admit women to public bars in Queensland. The context was the recent Taking to the Streets Exhibition, an extensive and well-researched showing of the radical movements in Brisbane in 1965–85. Looking back, how do I now view the Regatta demonstration and the subsequent campaigns for change for women in which I was involved? Where do they stand in relation to changes since? Do they still have relevance to goals for women now?