Underground Brisbane magazine The Cane Toad Times hops back into print

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, but without doubt, it was The Cane Toad Times.

The prickly Brisbane-based satirical magazine – spawned from radio station 4ZZZ and the UQ student newspaper Semper in the late 1970s during the Bjelke-Petersen government – has published its first new edition since 1990.

The Cane Toad Times was the Betoota Advocate of its day, and while perhaps not quite Oz Magazine, it left a nasty taste in many mouths.

Stephen Stockwell (left) and Johnny La Rue with their 2024 edition of The Cane Toad Times.Credit: Tony Moore

Back then, the Fitzgerald Inquiry opened the door to the state’s corruption horror, where the Queensland Police Special Branch had files on protesters, musicians, cartoonists, leftists and loonies, while the rest of the country simply made long-running jokes at Queensland’s expense.

The leftist Cane Toad Times lived in small swamps at Rocking Horse or Skinny’s Records, at music gigs, or at refectories and coffee houses at UQ, Griffith and QUT campuses.

The Cane Toad Times even sold Tony Fitzgerald Fan Club T-shirts when the QC started peeling back the layers of police and political corruption at the end of the 1980s.

Thirty-four years on, The Cane Toad Times is back, with a front cover showing the four riders of the satirical apocalypse – Donald Trump, Peter Dutton, Pauline Hanson and Rupert Murdoch – astride monstrous cane toads bent on taking the planet to hell.

The back cover gives you entry to Batshit Crazy magazine, with articles about backyard barbecue anti-UFO spray and the joys of conspiracy theories.

But why return?

“Seems the Doomsday Clock has never been closer to midnight, what with pandemics, overpopulation, knife crime, MAGA, Putin, rising sea levels, one-in-a-hundred-year weather events occurring every year, xenophobia, the LNP, cyber criminals, real criminals, Lego Masters, Truth Social, MAFS, Skynet, Sky News, androids and a hundred other guns pointing at the human race’s odd-shaped head,” the editorial grumps.

“What better time to laugh in the face of the Fates.”

The Cane Toad Times

You’ve gotta laugh, just as we did back in the day at Queensland’s “Big Things”, at weird characters like Captain Zondor, and illustrations by Matt Mawson, Judy Dunn, Dave Tyrer and others, amid a smattering of politics.

Most of the original Cane Toad conspirators are back in 2024, including Stephen Stockwell, illustrator Matt Mawson – who produced the cover art – Vivienne Wynter and Johnny La Rue.

The cane toad moniker was chosen because it was a pest, La Rue says. “For me, it was a pesky critter that didn’t ask to be here.”

The Cane Toad Times’ 2024 edition.Credit: Tony Moore

Stockwell, one of 4ZZZ’s early station co-ordinators, said the original Cane Toad Times crew chose the name carefully.

“It wanted to be a pest to the government, and it is a very Queensland thing. This is where [toads] began their Australian tour.”

The paper published seven issues between 1977 and 1979 before going on hiatus, then rebooting in 1983 to put out a further 15 editions.

By 1990, The Cane Toad Times and 4ZZZ collective had morphed into both an unfunny 4MMM radio show and the musical production house ToadShow, giving Brisbane the stage shows SherWoodstock and Phantoad of the Opera.

Good musicals both, but The Cane Toad Times itself simply ran out of toad stench.

“The other thing that 1990 spelt was the first full year of the Goss Labor government,” Stockwell says.

“And so, in a way, the first two iterations of The Cane Toad Times had achieved their desired effect and people were not worried about Joh any more. People were a lot more relaxed.”

Both Stockwell and fellow Cane Toad conspirator Johnny La Rue (yes, his pseudonym remains) say The Cane Toad Times needed Queensland’s right-wing era to thrive.

“There were two iterations of The Cane Toad Times 77-79, and some great people worked on that: Matt Mawson and Damien Ledwich, and Terry Murphy, who also worked on Semper.”

But Radio 4ZZZ – Australia’s first community radio station – was the glue. La Rue was studying arts/ law, while Stockwell finished a philosophy degree, but both effectively studied “the 4ZZZ degree”.

“Some of the Semper guys would work on Radio 4ZZZ’s Radio Times magazine, and that is where people became familiar with Matt Mawson’s graphics of Jackboot Joh and 4ZZZ’s strutting banana,” Stockwell says.

Some of Matt Mawson’s iconic characters from the era: Jackboot Joh, the 4ZZZ banana and a cane toad.Credit: Matt Mawson

Some of Mawson’s iconic illustrations are reproduced in the new 2024 edition, as well as new graphics.

Mawson first emerged as a graphic artist and musician alongside Tim Gruchy, Irene Luckus and John Willsteed in a collective called Zip. He subsequently produced hundreds of local music handbills and posters around Brisbane’s flourishing music and pop culture scene, collected by the State Library of Queensland.

The cover of a 1986 edition of The Cane Toad Times.Credit: University of Queensland

Mawson says he is inspired by MAD magazine and American cartoonist Robert Crumb’s radical Fritz the Cat cartoons of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“I was short-sighted, so my world was about 12 inches away from my face,” he says. “I got into cartooning that way.”

Never a university student, Mawson was working a “public service job in Creek Street” when he started listening to 4ZZZ.

“I subscribed and they sent me back a pretty boring-looking subscriber magazine. I had a few drawings and I dropped them back in to 4ZZZ, then they got me to come back and help with the [Radio Times] layout. And then the editors of Semper wrote to me and got me a job doing the layout, so I could leave the public service.”

Mawson’s satirical images defined Brisbane’s subculture of that era.

“No-one has even been able to work out who drew the original banana,” he says. “It was 4ZZZ’s original logo, but I ran with that, and I started doing banana themes on the cover of the early Cane Toad Times.

“With Joh, I was asked to do cartoons. I wasn’t particularly political, but the more I learnt about him, the less I liked him.

“I don’t think there is a sense of a subculture now, as it was back then.”

Crowdfunding gave birth to the November 2024 edition of The Cane Toad Times. La Rue thought it was time for at least one more edition, and asked his old friends for help.

“I came up with an end-of-times theme. There is a bit of a vibe around with climate change, wars, diseases, giant toads being discovered – and we’re approaching our end of times,” he laughs.

Mawson also thinks there is a third dawn coming for The Cane Toad Times in 2025.

“This one is called ‘End of Times’, so I suggested ‘Afterlife’. So we might make up another copy,” he says.

It seems that like its namesake, The Cane Toad Times is not at risk of extinction any time soon.

Find stockists or order online at The Cane Toad Times website.

Start the day with a summary of the most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.