John McKinna's major change era for South Australian police hits Vietnam protests backlash in the 1970s
Brigadier John McKinna wearing the Scottish chequered hat band he introduced as part of major changes to the South Australian police force. Right: A Vietnam War protest in Victoria Square, Adelaide.
Another military man from World War II, Brigadier John McKinna, was South Australian police commissioner (1957-72) during the dramatic clash when police insisted on dispersing anti-Vietnam War protesters from the key intersection of King William Street and North Terrace, Adelaide, on September 17, 1970.
This stark confrontation between dissenters and authority attracted national attention and from the new state Labor government under premier Don Dunstan, who sympathised with the anti-war movement but was wary of its radical wing and suspicious of police powers.
Dunstan called the Bright royal commission that condemned the demonstrators and recommended that police must be made “subject to appropriate ministerial direction on policy”. This recommendation was later enshrined in law.
McKinna’s term was otherwise marked by a major change that saw the South Australian police department amalgamated into one service in 1958. Ever since 1838, the police had been run as two branches, the foot and the mounted, later to become the metropolitan and the country police.
McKinna credited another former military commissioner Raymond Leane (1920-44) as being “really the father of the present-day police force” with his reorganising. McKinna revived Leane’s cadet training scheme and set up the Fort Largs Police Academy. In 1961, the academy took over and adapted part of the fort that was built at Largs Bay in the 1880s during fears of a threat from Russia and also expanded with barracks for artillery units during World War II. For the next 40 years from the 1960s, it became home to the cadet training scheme (initially three years; later shortened).
The South Australian police band also became a full-time unit during McKinna’s time. Also in the 1960s, new multi-storey police building was constructed in Angas Street, Adelaide (on the later federal courts site). When police headquarters were transferred to Greenhill Road, Eastwood, in 1978, the Angas Street building became central division headquarters.
