Newcastle’s most notorious riot lives on in the lyrics of Cold Chisel’s 1980 song Star Hotel, grainy YouTube videos and Novocastrian mythology. But beneath thecompelling images of surging crowds, hurled beer cans and flaming police cars was a radical intent that has been all but forgotten …

The Star Hotel in Newcastle has become a site of defiance for the marginalised young and dispossessed working class. To understand the whole story of the Star Hotel riot, it should be seen alongside other moments of resistance, Newcastle-style, such as the 1890 Maritime Strike, the Rothbury miners’ lockout in 1929 and the recent battle for the Laman Street fig trees. Radical Newcastle brings together short essays from academics, local historians, journalists and present-day radicals to document the region’s radical past.