History of the Cane Toad Times

The Beginning

Long story short. CTT version 1.0 began at the University of Queensland UQ in 1977. While punk was going crazy in response to the Queen’s silver jubilee, Queensland was firmly under the heel of the ultra-conservative, authoritarian Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his corrupt National Party stooges.His government opposed workers, women, sex education and free speech and favoured mining, agriculture, aggressive policing and small-mindedness. Street marches against the government were met with police violence and mass arrests which in turn prompted the birth of Cane Toad Times.

The first CTT collective brought out seven issues between May 1977 and June 1979 with topics from freedom and democracy to speedways and giant pineapples and introducing characters such as the Phantoad and Our Lady of Assumption – Detective. Financed by street sales, ads from alternative businesses and fund-raising concerts, the magazine flourished until police harassment forced many contributors to join the ranks of the Queensland refugees fleeing the state.

The Middle

Another adventurous gang rebooted the CTT for V2.0 in 1983. They had learnt a valuable lesson: don’t use your real name on anything incriminating. They may have had something to do with fledgling community radio station 4ZZZ. These new idiots were primarily concerned with A: having fun with words and pictures and B: sticking it to various men, one of whom was still a certain premier of a certain state.

The second collective brought out 15 editions between 1983 and 1990 with themes encapsulating the mix of fun and sometime serious, sometime gutter journalism on offer: Food and Corruption, Death and Style and Fear and Clothing. Recurring topics including big things, hat drivers, the excesses of Expo 88, flagrant political criminality and other Queensland quirks. Occasionally they made serious money with paraphernalia sales, particularly the Tony Fitzgerald Fan Club t-shirt, celebrating the lawyer charged with finding how rotten police and political corruption had got.

The CTT began to grow readership and many tentacles: a publishing tentacle, a Lifestyle Accessories tentacle, a musical comedy tentacle, a political communications tentacle, a radio tentacle until there were too many tentacles, and they all fell off leaving the publishing tentacle flailing about very lonely. The success of the Fitzgerald Inquiry and the election of the Goss government saw the rationale for the CTT disappear and the magazine followed soon afterwards.

Great story so far huh? All previous copies of CTT have been scanned and reside deep in the virtual bowels of the University of Queensland Library in no particular order.

The End

In 2023 some of the surviving V2.0 idiots decided, what the hell, let’s do V3. Now that we have internets and instagrams and faces on books and there is still a lot of sticking it to various men, and in these inclusive times, women, to be done, let’s do it one more time Cane Toad Times. And with wars breaking out all over, and the planet falling apart around our ears, and giant toads emerging to rule the earth, and civil war in America and the potential return of Trump, what better topic could we have but: The End of Times,

Why is it called the Cane Toad Times I hear you ask?

Well back in 1935 the Queensland sugar industry had a bit of a problem with beetles and with government support introduced the cane toad (Bufo Marinus) from Hawaii under the mistaken belief that the toads would eat the beetles.

The toads decided that it was too hard to reach the tippy tops of the cane to get the pests, so decided to become a pest itself and eat everything else instead. Fortuitously for the cane toad, anything that ate it died due to the incredibly poisonous sacs on its back. For those interested, the poison can be used for other highly illegal purposes. Don’t try this at home. It can be lethal. They killed my dog and I still haven’t got over it.

So at the time, in 1977, being a pest to the ruling class that can’t be eaten by the ruling class seemed like a good idea. Sure the actual cane toad has gone on to be a multi-award winning pest that has decimated native species by the billions, and that’s what we’d like to do. No, not decimate native flora and fauna by the billions but to be an incredibly successful pest using The Cane Toad Times as a platform and turning all the contributors into multi award winning contributors/billionaires. It all starts (and may well end) here.

More history of the Cane Toad Times