Every wall is like a history book.

One faded poster reads “4ZZZ survives the 14th of December 88”, marking the date Queensland’s longest-running community radio station was evicted from the University of Queensland, partly due to their radical politics.

Station historian Heather Anderson says students stormed right back in to reoccupy the place and it barely went off air, though ultimately it agreed to find a new home.

Since 1992 that has been the former Queensland Communist party headquarters on Barry Parade in Fortitude Valley, where many of the posters lining the walls of the ancient building advertise old gigs, while others have a more political bent.

One reads “Fred Nile is insane”, another “In league with Satan”. Another advertises the “Fees boycott ’88 – be there!” All speak to the station’s longevity as it celebrates 50 years of being on the air.

Walking up the rickety stairs, you pass under a tribute to the late Jon Baird – who helped establish the predecessors to Locked In, a show broadcast for imprisoned people. News clippings posted on the wall detail how the Prisoner’s Show, as it was once previously called, received information from radicals prisoners and reported it back via the airwaves during riots over conditions inside Brisbane’s infamous Boggo Road jail. That led to an inquiry, which forced the jail’s closure in 1992. Locked In still broadcasts weekly and artworks produced in jails decorate a section of the wall.

A more modern poster nearby describes “pronoun etiquette”. “Ask, don’t assume, not everyone uses the pronouns he or she,” it instructs.

A ‘common enemy’

In the era of podcasts and eight-second TikTok clips, 4ZZZ looks and sounds very much the same way it did on 8 December 1975 when the late announcer John Woods played Won’t Get Fooled Again by the Who – the first song ever played on the station.

The day Guardian Australia visits, Jack Montague is presenting his brand new program, The Anti Room, for the first time. “I’m a big fat lefty, and I like going to gigs,” he says, when asked why he joined the station. It’s an age-old reason.

When 4ZZZ began broadcasting in 1975, Brisbane was an extraordinarily conservative city. Midway through a 32-year National party government, it was, as one band put it, a “security city” in a police state.

Journalist Andrew Stafford authored Pig City, a history of Brisbane’s music scene. Much of the book deals with 4ZZZ for the simple reason that, for decades, they were about the only station playing music from local bands, and because the scene was so tied up with its politics.

Stafford says that in the 1980s, the cloying, threatening atmosphere of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government – when Queensland police routinely raided concerts and once infamously arrested the drummer from the Dead Kennedys after an 1983 gig – was a huge boon for the station as it gave them a “common enemy”.

“That was back when Triple Zed was close to a lone voice of resistance against the worst excesses of the Bjelke-Petersen era – and it played a significant role in documenting those excesses,” he says.

“It is of course not a lone voice now; merely another one in a hyper-fragmented media market.”

‘Central role in radical Brisbane’

It embraced other alternative communities as well. It first produced LBTQI content in 1978, an era when police were still laying charges against men for being gay.

In the 1990s, Queer Radio was joined by Dykes On Mykes. In 2022, the station began broadcasting a show for the transgender community, Tranzmission, which executive producer, presenter and founder Ez Dos Santos says is among the first of its kind in Australia.

The show got new meaning as a result of the state government’s ban on gender-affirming care for young people in public hospitals, he says.

“We’ve had listeners come into 4ZZZ just to tell me that the show saved their lives,” Dos Santos says.

Former station manager Jack McDonnell argues it’s almost a miracle the station still runs at all. That’s largely thanks to the thousands who have contributed over the years, some who turn up volunteering to do thankless tasks such as basic maintenance, others brilliant presenters or DJs.

“We’re constantly running and doing it with very little money,” he says.

Many old friends from the past are returning in its 50th year, McDonald says, and 4ZZZ has organised a range of commemorative events, from concerts to an exhibition and even a book, People Powered Radio: 50 Years of Australian Community Radio Station 4ZZZ, written by Anderson, a Griffith University associate professor who has been a volunteer since 1991.

“I think that 4ZZZ has played a central role in radical Brisbane for the whole of its existence,” McDonald says.

“It was literally born out of a recognition that there needed to be a more wide-reaching form of alternative media that would reach the public.

“Since then whenever there’s been a need for a voice to speak up against injustice and bullshit, 4ZZZ has been there. Hopefully it always will be.”