Being the Bus Ticket Girl

Just last week i was reading a poem by Jane Frank, about Mort Street, Red Hill, that Brisbane suburb with the steep hillsides and wooden houses that has become something of a genre these days. My daughter’s first Brisbane share house was in Warmington street, and I lived in several share households. I recalled that when I was living in Cairns Terrace and working at Women’s House, I became the Bus Ticket Girl. Here is the story:

Part #1 Being the Bus Ticket Girl OR How a Dispute over 5 cents got me arrested.

In 1976 I got on the bus with Margaret Spivey. She had red hair one centimetre long, white skin spotted with freckles, overalls and a belligerent attitude. We were going to visit a client of Women’s House who was in the hospital. Back then the bus fare from Roma Street to the Brisbane hospital was 25 cents. However when we boarded the bus to return, the driver demanded 30 cents. Margaret demurred.

“How can this be right? We paid 25 cents to go the exact same distance the other way?”

She refused to pay, stamped to the back of the bus and sat down. The driver peered at me through faded blue eyes in a weather beaten chalk-coloured face.

“Are you going to pay?”

I had an ill advised moment of sisterhood and solidarity. “I’m with her,” I said.

But under that chalky skin and those faded blue eyes lurked the soul of a Gestapo officer. He drove the bus directly to the Fortitude Valley police station. There all the other passengers were offloaded while Margaret and I were descended upon by two police officers, one a young woman. We were accused of evading a bus fare.

At this accusation I explained to the young female officer that in fact we had offered to pay 25 cents and the driver refused. I tried to convince her that she and I were fellow oppressed workers in a system, that I needed to get back to my job at Women’s House and we had only been on a mercy mission to visit a sick client in hospital. She stared blankly and I went on to argue that the capitalist system had oppressed us both as women and she should show solidarity because that the driver was a severely disturbed misogynist control maniac who had disrupted the day of a whole bus full of people rather than accept the correct fare.

I’ll never forget her next words:

“You think you’re clever because you know a lot of big words.”

The male officer then forced Margaret and I from the bus and took us to a cell in the Watchhouse where we were locked in. We spent the entire night there absolutely terrified, stared at by a changing parade of large burly men. In the morning Frank arrived. Frank was the duty solicitor, lean and deeply creased.

“Just plead guilty and you can go home,” said Frank.

A night in the cells had knocked all the rebellious Irish spirit out of Margaret. She became lachrymose and agreed. I was not so sure. “But we didn’t do anything wrong,” I told Frank. He shook his head, causing is greying forelock to slip across his face.

A couple of hours later, hungry and quite grubby, we were escorted into the Magistrates Court. We were too overcome with lassitude to argue when Frank told the Magistrate that we were very sorry for evading a bus fare but the amount was only 30 cents and we had already spent a night in the lockup which was a more than adequate punishment. The magistrate agreed, pronounced us guilty, banged his gravel and dismissed us.

Part #2  Being the Bus Ticket Girl

The next part of the story explains why for years afterwards I was sometimes stopped in the street by random strangers who asked me, “Aren’t you the bus ticket girl?” And indeed I was.

Upon our return to Women’s House, Margaret and I were greeted with shock and horror to hear that we had been confined overnight over such a trivial matter. My boss Nancy went straight to the top. Barrister Lew Wyvill was well known as an advocate of civil liberties and had defended such cases pro bono. Before long I was in his wood panelled office at the Inns of Court explaining the whole episode which was faithfully recorded in shorthand by a secretary. We were assisted by his offsider, Wayne Goss.

Lew agreed that the behaviour of both bus driver and Magistrate was outrageous and dismissed Frank as a useless piss-pot. He agreed to represent us in court to have the conviction quashed. The whole affair caught the imagination of the public of Brisbane. Young women all night in the watch-house? Over 5 cents? It happened at a time when Joh’s government was seen to be steadily eroding civil liberties of citizens. There was well-founded  suspicion that the police force under Commissioner Ray Whitrod was riddled with nepotism and corruption. 

I was interviewed by newspaper reporters. I argued my case on television. Twenty friends and comrades crowded into the lounge room of our Red Hill house to see me in a white linen dress recounting the frightening ordeal and stressing that we were not skulking up the back of the bus, we had taken a principled stand over being wrongly charged.  I had tried to look very neat and tidy but noticed that my bra strap was showing outside the strap of my dress. “Don’t worry about that,” said my housemate Barbara, “It looks working class.”

We had our day in court. The conviction was quashed. But the system found a way to hit back at Lew Wyvill: the Judge refused to award costs. This rendered Lew quite lugubrious as he essentially did the job for nothing. As he rightly pointed out, it was intended to discourage him from taking on such charity cases. Luckily it didn’t work: during the following “Right to March” campaign with its mass protests Lew defended literally thousands of civil rights protesters. As for his capable young assistant? Who thought that name rang a bell? Well, he became Premier of Queensland after the 1987 Fitzgerald Report blew the Bjelke-Petersen regime right out of the water.