This piece is part of a summer opinion series from our writers about a year of their youth when they had trying times.

We’d been rolling up the highway for a couple of hours before the truckie roused himself to inquire why I was going to Brisbane.

Tony Wright in his travelling days in the early 1970s.

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m only going as far as Sydney today.”

The truckie, arms like legs of ham and a gut barely contained by a blue singlet suggesting years of wrestling longdistance trucks on a diet of steak and eggs, looked sideways at me.

“Pig’s arse, mate,” he said. “We’re going to Brisbane.”

Which is how I accidentally found myself about 18 hours later in the midst of one of Queensland’s most famous protests – the anti-apartheid demonstration outside Brisbane’s Tower Mill Motel, where the South African Springboks rugby players were resting between games that were so disrupted by smokebombs, field invaders and battles between protesters and police they may as well have been called riots.

Joh Bjelke-Petersen was Queensland premier from 1968 to 1987.Credit:

That evening, about 600 police, given free rein by then-premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s declaration of a state of emergency, attacked a crowd of peaceful protesters in the park opposite the motel with truncheons, fists and boots.

I was a bystander without a clue, but a charging bull of a cop with a billy club felled me anyway as I fled. Welcome to Queensland, the State of Emergency.

I was 19 and had planned to hitch my way from Victoria to Far North Queensland, taking my time going up along the coast. Some time the previous night, a........

© The Sydney Morning Herald