I’m still not quite sure why the Occupy protesters insist on camping out. I guess it’s mainly a symbolic gesture about reclaiming what should rightfully be public, in this case public space. Does that mean they believe that anyone should be able to camp in a public space, or is it only acceptable as part of a political protest? So, for example, if backpackers wanted to save money by pitching a tent in a public space, should they be allowed to? What’s wrong with people camping in the streets anyway? I guess it does pose some issues in terms of waste disposal, but couldn’t they use public toilets? Are there public toilets open 24/7 in the CBD?
As I understand it, Melbourne City Council evicted the protesters was the Melbourne City Council Activities Local Law 2009, specifically section 2.11:
Unless in accordance with a permit, a person must not camp in or on any public place in a vehicle, tent, caravan or any type of temporary or provisional form of accommodation.
I’m interested these anti-camping laws impact on homeless people – how many have tents? How often councils enforce it against them? My sense is that instances of the council using the laws to evict homeless people would be rare, and vary depending on the reaction of constituents and other council priorities. In the United States, anti-camping laws have frequently been challenged by homelessness groups, with mixed results, see eg here and here.
The state government and local councils gave conflicting reasons about the legal basis for the eviction. The council referred to the activities law, while the state government referred to section 6 of the Summary Offence Act, which gives the police powers to move someone if they’re breaching the piece, likely to endanger safety, or a risk to public safety. When introduced in 2009, these ‘moving-on’ laws were criticised by homelessnesses groups who were concerned that they would have a disproportionate impact on homeless people. However, as The Age reported,
protesters are exempted from the laws under section 6(5), so the state government cannot rely on it.
According to The Age, the police’s Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana said Victoria Police used a combination of trespassing law in the Summary Offences Act and breach of the peace common law to move the demonstrators. I’m not sure about the common law, but breach of the peace and trespassing provisions are contained in section 9 of the Summary Offences Act, with s9(d) making it an offence to ‘wilfully trespass’ in any public place [not sure what constitutes 'trespassing' in the context of a public place – given that it's public, anyone presumably has access] and s9(g) making it an offence to enter any place, whether private or public, so as to cause a breach of the peace or ‘reasonable apprehension of a breach of the peace.’ Again, not sure what constitutes ‘breach of the peace’. What constitutes a ‘peaceful’ public space? Does it just mean non-violence, does it mean not getting in people’s way, or does it maintaining an ‘orderly’ space, with nothing unexpected? Perhaps there’s something in case law that the Victoria police were relying on.
Apparently after the eviction, protesters were served a notice banning them from the CBD until 23 November, a move which the Australian Lawyers Alliance condemned and suggested that was of dubious legality.
This weekend, Melbourne’s City Square is taken up by a booze bus, a tent where one of the Transport Accident Commission’s ominous videos plays, and a model of a crashed car. Melbourne City Council launched the road safety exhibition exactly a week after mayor Robert Doyle ordered the forcible evictions of Occupy Melbourne protesters from the square (you can read my account of it here), and a day before the protesters were set to occupy Treasury Gardens. The display emphasises law and public safety, implying that the government has things under control. But a government display about drink driving, death, and legal punishment doesn’t seem like the ideal way to create a lively public space. I wonder what the tourists think.
I went to a General Assembly at the State Library on Tuesday. There were a few hundred Occupy people there, but the first thing I noticed was the overwhelming police presence. It wasn’t necessarily the numbers, but their positioning; the way they stand in lines, surrounding the protesters. It’s slightly intimidating, and I suspect that’s the intention.
The rules of the general assembly are that working groups, or individuals, put forward proposals, which can only pass by consensus. If the group can’t reach consensus, the facilitators take requests for modification or clarification. If they still don’t agree, the motion can pass with a 90% majority vote, or at lowest, 60%. At Melbourne’s general assembly, each new speaker must declare their political affiliation. I heard that this rule was brought in as a result of concerns about certain interest groups, particularly socialist groups, dominating the group. As you can see there were quite a few people at the meeting.
Much of the assembly dealt with the fall-out from Friday’s violent eviction. It started with Sarah Harmer, a domestic violence counsellor, talking about how to recognise and deal with trauma, and how people could get through it. And sure, the protest wasn’t Syria, but violence from an authority figure, and the experience of being a victim of organised violence, is no small thing. Depending the person and their previous experiences, it could be extremely traumatising. The working groups reported that out of 17 trucks of stuff confiscated from the City Square camp, only three ended up in storage. The rest, including all the books from the group’s library, and their first aid supplies, had been sent to landfill.
The indigenous working group presented the group’s first substantive proposal. I was quite surprised to see three Aboriginal people get up and speak – I had unthinkingly assumed that the working group would be made up of well-meaning white people. Viv, the speaker, seemed nervous, and the young guys standing next to her kept putting their arms around her shoulder for support. But she spoke beautifully, asking the assembly to seek the truth about colonisation and suggesting that the City Square evictees may have a sense of how indigenous people felt. The indigenous working group then proposed that Occupy Melbourne recognise the custodianship and sovereignty of the Aboriginal people and stand beside them in fighting for a treaty.
The proposal passed with consensus, with no objections, clarifications, or debate. I don’t know if anyone would have felt comfortable speaking against it. It’s difficult to argue against something that calls for power and voice to be given to the most hard-done-by, and least listened to, group in Australia. For all I know, this is something that Occupy Melbourne had discussed extensively already, and indeed, why shouldn’t they act on the advice of indigenous people involved in the movement?
But I’m not sure, is there broad-based support for a treaty Aboriginal people and their various ‘countries’? What would a treaty look like? How does Occupy Melbourne plan to engage with Aboriginal groups and find out whether they want a treaty, and what such a treaty would look like? Perhaps I’m probably being too analytical about the whole thing.
The assembly highlighted some familiar frustrations about consensus decision-making. Invariably there are always some people who believe the group must participate in every single decision, even simple operational matters. The resultant fixation on process can make meetings so frustratingly cumbersome that people stop participating. For example, the logistics group proposed that they be delegated the responsibility of preparing the set-up for the planned Treasury Gardens occupation the following Saturday. But there was no consensus on this. One woman said passionately that this was the first important test of the group’s democracy, and suggested they needed to put the layout plan to a separate general assembly. After a prolonged discussion, the motion passed with a 90% majority.
There was also no consensus on whether the group should march through the city on Saturday before setting up camp at Treasury Gardens. ‘I have no affiliations, but I’m a member of the human race,’ said one guy speaking against the proposal to march through the city, ‘And I like what I see here.’ People laughed. But quite a few agreed with his subsequent point about maintaining the city’s functionality and not disrupting the traffic, which would inconvenience the general public and possibly turn them against the movement. As an alternative, some of the crowd were yelling out a suggestion that they march on the footpath, which just seemed ridiculous – what about the pedestrians?
I also overheard the girl next to me explaining to a first-timer that some of the disagreement about the march reflected a concern that Socialist Alliance would take it over with their red flags and banners, and that it would make the movement look bad. I don’t know whether this is true or not.
A young girl with dark wavy hair got up and said she thought marching was just a replication of the old forms, and that the group should be thinking creatively, like artists not bureaucrats. This attracted some interest. One thing I noticed about the assembly was that people listen fairly well; and I wonder whether this is a product of the fact that everyone needs to be involved in the decision-making.
Another person proposed that the group hold a protest at lunchtime on Thursday calling for Doyle and Baillieu to resign. People spoke against this was two reasons; firstly because Baillieu’s involvement in the forcible eviction from City Square was unclear, and secondly because it was seen as a diversion of the group’s energies. Again, no agreement. By 8.30pm, it was freezing outside. The facilitator noted that one of the problems with consensus decision-making is that people get tired and disengage (or leave), and then decisions get rushed through undemocratically. She asked whether the group wanted to continue for another half an hour, and to my surprise, they did. I wasn’t quite as dedicated, and left.
Consensus-decision making definitely has its frustrations, including the slowness of process. But Australian politics sees so many decisions rushed through as apparently ‘urgent’, often as a means of shutting out public participation. In my view, the extra time is worth it to get more people involved. Whether Occupy Melbourne will manage to do that is another question.
Yesterday, over 1000 people marched through the city to Treasury Gardens. It was an unexpectedly day, spirits seemed high, and the gathering in Treasury Gardens felt a little like a carnival. After lunch, the General Assembly was presented with three options for occupying. First, Treasury Gardens, which had been their initial plan, but they’d served with a notice by City of Melbourne saying that if they set up camp their belongings would be confiscated. Second, Edinburgh Gardens in Fitzroy. Apparently this was the option preferred by the police, perhaps because the protesters would be hidden away there. Apparently the logistics working group had spoken to Yarra City Council, which had expressed slight trepidation, saying that their response would be dependent on the response of their constituency.
There were different views about whether North Fitzroy dwellers would be likely to call for their eviction. ‘The area is surrounded by some very highly strung, wealthy, privileged individuals, who up until now have been supporting the movement,’ suggested the logistic coordinator, yelling into a rolled up bit of paper after the PA system had died. But things might be different if the events moved to their own neighbourhood, he suggested, ‘let’s remember, these are people who complain about a game of football in the park.’
Yarra City Councillor Stephen Jolley also spoke against the Edinburgh Gardens occupation: ‘Reality check – you can’t buy a house for less than 1.5 million around Edinburgh Gardens.’ While it seems a bit simplistic to equate wealth with intolerance, the reaction of some Fitzroy-dwellers to noise from long-established pubs does suggest that they’re slightly averse to disruption in their neighbourhood. One girl spoke in favour of going to Edinburgh Gardens by saying that Yarra City Council had gave them permission. When corrected, she laughed, said that she was talking shit, and left the floor. It’d be nice if politicians would do that sometimes.
In the end, they settled on Bolan Lane, outside RMIT University. It was more central and the CFMEU had offered to provide logistical support there. At that stage, a decision was made to march to the university through the city, quickly, so they could get there before the police organised.
As Michael Lallo notes in The Age today, the feeling of the second march was far more strident, but also celebratory, with climate group Beyond Zero Emission’s large tricycle playing rousing songs such as Rock the Casbah, and people dancing around behind it.
At Bolan Place, the protester set up with the policeagain massing in intimidating formations, before a bunch of them left for the old jail, where presumably the would get a briefing on their next moves.
A good-looking newsreader posed silently, awkwardly in front of a camera for about half an hour. The news channel had organised a slightly nutty-looking protester with a sign to stand in the back ground, and she was making noises of impatience. The reason they were waiting is because it had just been announced that the CEO of Qantas had decided to go into lock-down. At this stage, I left.
According to Twitter journalist Asher Wolf, they then had to leave Bolan Lane too, because it was private land, and RMIT would have asked the police to evict them. Given the state of university education, and its growing corporatisation, this seemed kind of ironic to me. The group then split, with some of them going to Edinburgh gardens and others to the State Library. By midnight, about 30 people were camping outside the state library, a small proportion of the 1000 that had marched earlier that day. Soon afterwards, the small group was forcibly evicted, apparently without the same violence as the city square eviction. They then returned the state library lawn, without setting up tents. The police agreed to let them stay there the night. It rained, and they started playing guitars.
And here’s a skit the protesters performed at Treasury Gardens on Saturday.
The above jumper spotted at Savers on Sydney Road. It may still be there if anyone’s interested.
I also like this little strip near the corner of Blyth and Nicholson Streets. I guess Gary Soloman is the proprietor? Please note the beautiful yarn bombing in the reflection of the shopfront in picture 2.
I got stopped riding my bike on Canning Street last week. There was a road block in the bike lane with orange witches hats. The young police guy said that it was a campaign to raise awareness of bike safety. If I had all the right gear I’d get some goodies (unspecified, but he gestured to his back pocket). If not, I’d get a brochure. I could also enter a competition by writing my name on a clipboard (prize unspecified).
He asked where my lights were. It was daytime, so I told him they were in my backpack. Then he asked me why I was wearing thongs. I said I often wear them; was there anything illegal about that? Not that he knew of, he said. ’You can wear anything that’s comfortable, I guess.’
‘Sometimes I wear a skirt that’s too short,’ I said. Realising I was flirting with him, which was a bit naff, I backed off. ‘I always regret it though, after I leave the house.’ He looked a bit awkward. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen some of the dresses girls are wearing today,’ He fiddled with the D-lock hanging on my handlebars. ‘That’s a big D-lock, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Is it heavy?’ ‘Yeah’, I said.
He gave me a white and blue Victoria police wrist band that says ‘How Safe is Your Bike’ and has those Vicpol checks on it. Maybe they thought it would appeal to the youth. I suspect they didn’t realise that it is so uncool that it’s actually cool. When I rode off I realised I didn’t have a brochure, which I would have been quite interested in. Obviously I didn’t go back though.
This is all I’ve been able to find about their safety campaign.
Cyclists can do crazy things sometimes. I don’t know much about the campaign, but it seems to have an educative rather than punitive approach. And terms of reasons for cyclists breaking the law, apart from opportunism, it’s also sometimes difficult to know what the rules actually are in certain situations as a cyclist. So in that sense, an education campaign isn’t a bad thing. Lights are also really important. I’ve been in a crash once for stupidly not wearing my front light, and a car drove into me after it failed to stop at a poorly lit roundabout. Needless to say that I always wear my lights now. Not that I should need to have a near-death experience before doing the right thing.
A few weeks ago The Age ran a series of articles on driver/cyclist ‘wars’, pieces which were pretty reductionist. They also put up this video of the intersection outside Flinders Street station, with bikes doing all sort of illegal things. This is also a pretty bad intersection for bikes.
My theory is that where bike infrastructure is shit, it’s hard for bikes to know how to flow with traffic, and as a result they’ll tend to behave erratically. I call it a WTFcycle moment. It’s the same on my commute, which is largely pleasant except between Nicholson Street and Exhibition Street, a point where bikes haven’t factored into the planning at all. Because it’s so crazy there, bikes do all kinds of things. Not to excuse stupid behaviour, but just saying.
A recent study suggests that drivers are responsible for 87% of accidents. Given this, the government should spend their money educating drivers, too, to do things like giving cyclists at least a metre’s space if possible. Or, in the Netherlands, for example, when they have a driving test, they’re taught to open the door with their right hand. That way, they are more likely to see cyclists coming, and it prevents a cyclist from getting smashed in the face.
Here’s one of the cleverest driver education ads I’ve seen, from the UK.
Also, the Netherland’s Drive With Your Heart (Rij met je hart) campaign. What I like about it is the humane aspect; underpinning it is the idea of cars seeing cyclists as people, not just objects. When you’re in traffic, it’s so much easier to treat the people in the other vehicles as objects, because you have a certain amount of distance from them. That’s why people will be so much ruder in a car than they would ever be in person.
I think the translation is roughly:
‘Cars today are full of things that protect the driver: belts, crumple zones, airbags, ABS, electronic stability control…And there is an element in the car that protects other road users. That part is in you. Drive with your heart.’
‘Vague protests are vague,’ commented a friend about the Occupy Melbourne protests when I asked her what she thought about them, over a glass of expensive wine at the Courthouse in North Melbourne. But I like the Occupy protests’ ambiguity – it seems to leave space for nuanced stories and creative solutions. If the organisers had a 20-point manifesto, they may not have been able to gather a critical mass, because people would have been too busy arguing over the detail. So the idea is to start a public conversation, build a constituency, and then involve as many people as possible in the solution. Perhaps this is naive and unrealistic. The lack of a clear message has certainly confused and alienated some people for whom it seems too disorganised and uncertain.
So why the protests? My friend suggested that human nature is such that people just want to protest; that they have an inherent need to vent about their respective sources of angst, and to be part of a drama. This is true, I think. I can feel it myself at times, when I’m at a protest. But there are also real issues behind the Occupy movement. As I understand, it’s about inequality, corporate greed, and a lack of democracy; the fact that a minority of people control most of the wealth, and that the majority have little say in the decisions that affect them. As poverty and unemployment increase, the financial institutions responsible for the financial crisis continue to operate with impunity, in many cases being propped up by taxpayers’ funds, money which could have been used to fund public services like schools, hospitals, and public transport.
Another friend who’d been at the Occupy protests in Germany observed that they attracted a broad demographic; families, middle-aged professionals, older people, etc. The Australian protests haven’t attracted the same level of support. Perhaps this is because compared to Germany, we’ve been relatively untouched by the GFC. In my view, our relative wellbeing, combined with a sense of insularity left over from the era when Australia’s physical isolation actually meant something, contributes to Australians’ tendency to trust markets and widespread disinterest in political engagement (to be fair, this is also is also a cynical apathy bred of disappointment, but it’s self-reinforcing, too). So here, the movement has been portrayed as ‘fringe’, and it is, in the sense that it hasn’t attracted much public support.
As is often the case with protests, Occupy Melbourne has mostly attracted the usual suspects, of whom many, if not all, fall into overlapping categories of seasoned activists, socialists, artists, hippies and hipsters. The media has focused excessively on the ‘feral hippy’ or ‘trendy hipster’ appearance of these protesters, reeling off their characteristics in tinny observational pieces – skinny jeans, dreads, Guy Fawkes masks, piercings, youth, students, crazy guys wearing tweed, tattoos – as if to say, how can you take possibly take these guys seriously? It’s true that these subcultural aspects can be alienating. When I heard the crowd at Occupy Melbourne chanting, ‘We’re the 99%,’ part of me wanted to say, ‘Are you serious? You guys are like, the 1%.’ But why stigmatise people for what they wear? Does a protester have to be wearing a suit to be taken seriously?
I’ve heard some people, including left-wingers, say that they can understand the relevance of the protests in US and Europe, but not in Melbourne, because the circumstances are different here. To me, this stems from an outdated insular attitude in which Australia is seen as a separate entity rather than part of an unjust global economy. Anyway, Australia does suffer from the issues of poverty (tried living off Centrelink payments?), political and corporate greed (eg pokies, tax breaks for mining companies, tax breaks for property investors vs little protection for renters), and deteriorating public services (last time you tried to get public dental treatment or get to work on public transport if you live in Templestowe or Altona?) And if you accept that some people are suffering, either here or globally, what’s wrong with protesting in support of them, even if you’re doing OK yourself?
I first encountered the Occupy Melbourne protesters in a CBD shopping arcade walkway. I was carrying a Portmans bag, having unsuccessfully tried to return a dress there. I took a flyer and slipped it into my Portmans bag, deriving a certain pleasure from the irony of this. I intended to go down to the Occupy Melbourne site and check it out, but didn’t make it there until yesterday, when I heard about the forcible eviction of campers in City Square, and associated reports of police brutality. I wanted to see what was happening with my own eyes.
It’s unclear who decided to evict the protesters. I originally heard it was an order of Melbourne City Council, but maybe it was just Mayor Doyle, given that councillor Cathy Oke said she didn’t know anything about it and has backed calls for an Ombudsman inquiry into the decision. It’s difficult to imagine that the state government wasn’t involved either. But so far, Doyle has copped most of the blame, and has done himself no favours by writing misleading and incendiary opinion pieces for the Sunday Herald Sun suggesting that the protesters’ camping gear is somehow weapons of war. The opposite of statesmanlike.
There was speculation that the Queen’s visit explained the urgency. Perhaps Doyle, or the state government, didn’t want to give the impression that they couldn’t control their city. But I doubt the Queen would have been overly fussed; she’s probably seen a lot worse in her time.
In any event, it seemed like a sure way to add fuel to the fire and galvanise a protest that had far been small and peaceful, and may have petered out by itself if just left alone. And who cares if it had gone on for a while: the presence of the tents wasn’t exactly cataclysmic for Melburnians. Even the conservative Australian agreed that it was a bad decision.
Turning into Swanston Street from Bourke Street and walking towards the protests, I saw security guards guarding the town hall and lines of police cars parked along Swanston Street. City Square was blocked off with temporary fencing and surrounded by rows of police, including police on horses.
You couldn’t get close enough the square to see what was going on there, but I could vaguely make out that there were still some campers there. A group of protesters stood on the raised part on Collins Street next to the square, with a crowd milling around them.
Apart from the chanting and the protesters’ ‘alternative’ attire, it was hard to distinguish them from observers. Some people looked ‘respectable’, wearing suits etc, and you’d think they were there just to watch, but then they you’d hear them say something sympathetic about the cause. Amongst the protesters, I recognised some good people I knew from the Greens and community organisations I’ve worked with. Lots of people were watching from upstairs office buildings.
Police started pulling protesters out of the square. Some of them were just being walked out, and those that wouldn’t cooperate were carried or dragged. In a way, just the pure brute force of it seemed animalistic. The police had the weapons, and they were bound to win. But the protesters had some kind of a moral power, too, arising out of their vulnerability, sense of being wronged, and belief in the cause(s!).
Previously I thought that being forcibly removed from a protest would bring a sort of glory for a dedicated protester, but on the whole, their faces looked tired, stressed, and humiliated. It was like a parade, with the crowd milling around to watch and the protesters shouting slogans such as ‘The world is watching!’ and ‘We are the 99%’. They were outraged, and I also got the sense that they were to an extent enjoying the drama.
For a time, the outrage was largely directed at police, who copped quite a bit of a abuse from the (very few) rude protesters: a girl twirling around in excitement yelling to her friends ‘Fuck the Police!’ a young guy reminding the policemen of their working class origins – ‘You are the poor working class but you are standing up for the rich!’ – and a particularly unpleasant older man with a hard face, yelling in a sandpapery voice, ‘Go and tell your wives about this you filthy pigs’ (never mind that quite a few of the police officers were women) and ‘You Nazi fascists!’ At this point I got pissed off and told the younger guy (I was too scared by the older one), that the police were just carrying out orders: what were they meant to do, refuse to take orders and risk losing their job? His simplistic reply was that it ‘takes a certain kind of policemen to be a protester.’
I was directly facing a line of police officers, whose faces displayed something like contempt at the abuse. And it struck me how the bad behaviour of a few protesters or policemen can so easily solidify conflict between the two groups. Of course, conflict’s pretty much inevitable anyway, when heavy-handed tactics are used to get people to do something against their will. But putting the focus on police/protester conflict constricted and simplified the narrative: it was no longer about a lack of democracy or gap between rich and poor, but simply police vs protesters.
And then protesters then moved to occupy the intersection of Collins and Swanston streets. I think they had been forced away from their previous position, but it was hard to tell what had happened. A line of police officers on horseback moved into the intersection to force the crowd back. It got messy. People were shouting. All of a sudden there was a person on the ground with his shirt rolled up to his neck, and a person being trampled by the horse. A mass of people, many of whom hadn’t previously engaged with the conflict, rushed into the fray; why, I’m not sure, but apart from curiosity, I sensed that there was also some concern for the people who were being hurt.
Even if you tried to get close, it was very difficult to tell what was actually happening and who initiated the conflicts between horses and people But given that the policemen were pushing the crowd back using the threat of violence (being trampled by the horses), conflict and collision were pretty much unavoidable. The police officers looked really stressed, and their horses pawed the ground as the policemen pulled them back. I could feel my own heart beating too; partly from fear about things getting out of control, but also from excitement.
It was an interesting intellectual experience, observing the way people move in crowds and how, regardless of individual police officers’ benign intentions, provocative police tactics tend to escalate conflict in a crowd. One of my friends directed me to an article about the psychology of crowds at a European football game when subjected to inappropriate policing. The article recounted research carried out by the United Kingdom Home Office in the early 2000s which showed that, when fans witnessed police tactics they perceived as excessively heavy-handed: ‘ “non-violent” social identity appeared to change such that conflict became more acceptable, “conflictual” fans were more likely to be seen as common in-group members and some fans actually sought to provoke and engage in “disorder”.’ The article’s obtusely written, but you get the picture: people are provoked when they witness behaviour they think is unfair, even if they weren’t involved in the conflict before.
By the time I left the protesters had fully occupied the square and were sitting there with their loudspeakers, with a few people walking around offering fruit.
As usual, some religious/spiritual people took the opportunity to pitch their message.
I overheard the following comments throughout the rest of the day:
‘Did you walk through the protest? What was it like?’
‘Oh, you know, just a small bunch of people sitting in the middle of Bourke and Swanston wearing ponchos and dreadlocks. Stopping the trams from getting past.’
‘Why do the trams stop? Why don’t they just run over them?
‘Were there any people there?’
‘Oh, not really, just a few observers, most of whom were just going to and from their jobs. They actually had jobs to go to; they were actually gainfully employed. Unlike the protestors.’
‘They don’t have any message really, do they? They just want to destroy all corporations.’
‘The funniest thing is they’re calling for the downfall of capitalism but most of them are carrying iPhones or getting their coffees from Starbucks.’
Lots of people complained about disruption to their commuter routes, and I’m sure it was bloody annoying, but the fact is that if the police had never intervened, the protesters wouldn’t have been pushed out into the intersection, and trams wouldn’t have been stopped. I also wonder what’s so virtuous about being ‘gainfully employed.’ Really, is there anything so special about carting yourself off to a dead end job, which may or may not be doing society any good? Is making money any more virtuous than studying, playing music, or getting involved in activism?
But the most annoying criticism is of the hypocrisy of tech-savvy protesters in using their iphones, or co-opting the corporate system by buying their Starbucks. I mean, they can’t help living in the world! What are they meant to do? Swear off technology altogether? Rip up some of pavement in City Square and build a vegie garden there and a small wood fire for cooking (using only sustainably-sourced wood of course)? Since when was moral purity a prerequisite for activism? Are you not allowed to try to be good if you can’t succeed in being 100% ethical?
One woman I spoke to yesterday seemed particularly upset about the protests; I’m not sure why. ‘I walked past the fruit loops [protesters] when they were camped in City Square and they weren’t violent,’ she said, adding contemptuously, ‘although they looked like they hadn’t washed for a while,’ not considering that it might be hard to find a shower if you’re camping out in the CBD. She went on. ‘The other problem I have with it is that it wasn’t non-violent.’ I was incredulous, pointing out that it was the police who caused the violence. She shook her head. ‘You just need to be really well-organised to have a non-violent protest,’ she said, ‘and they weren’t organised.’
In her view, another problem with the protests was that the Socialist Party were involved, but they weren’t really socialists, they were communists. She explained to me how socialism was different to communism, offering Eastern Europe as an example. I argued that you can’t just discount the cause because you don’t like the groups that join the protests. The solution to that, if you support the cause (not that she did I don’t think), is to join it yourself. ‘I was at a Wikileaks protest’, I started, ‘…and’ – at which point she interrupted, sounding horrified, ‘You were at a Wikileaks protest?’ I gave up, realising that I was fighting on too many fronts.
A younger friend of mine made one of my favourite comments about the protesters. I got the impression that he thinks a lot of it’s quite silly, but he’s pretty smart, and sharp enough to know that there are real issues they’re protesting about. He asked me if I thought the protests were just ferals, or if they had a point. I gave him a convoluted answer. He summed up: ‘OK, so it’s neither category A nor category B.’
Here’s a video. Sometimes it seemed like there were almost as many people taking photos and videos, as there were protesting. But maybe they’re the same thing these days.
It’s amazing how quickly your mind, given the space of a short holiday, will turn to questions about the choices you’ve made, the kind of life you live, how to find meaning and whether there’s any point at all. Sure, these points of enquiry are present in everyday life, bubbling away beneath the surface, but in between brushing your teeth, going to work, and attending various events, there’s not much time to explore these fundamental questions, and in any event, doing so can highlight uncomfortable, intractable dissonances with the life you’ve chosen, or fallen into. Instead, you spend a lot of time thinking about concrete and contextual things, without considering their broader meanings, for example, this weekend I thought about: what food to eat when hungover, the purchase of a sequinned dress, fear of my landlord and whether to give someone a second chance.
But given a bit distance from the strictures of daily routine, and some space for dwelling on things, the brain soon starts to rebel from its usual obedient functionality. The questions, doubts, and dawning realisations emerge, ephemerally at first but quickly reaching a crescendo. But how quickly you forget when you get home.
I wonder if, given four years of just not doing much, reading, writing, relaxing in a relatively placid environment, you’d emerge much wiser about life. We have a limited amount of time on earth, and if one of the things you seek is understanding and consciousness, you need to carve out time and space. And I’m not talking about going to India and connecting with the soil etc, or joining an ashram. Reality is right here. Anyway, read this, if you haven’t already.
My name’s Raili Simojoki, I’m a writer, Greens member and feminist.
I read your piece about women going to war. I personally don’t think we should be sending anyone to war, although haven’t quite got that worked out intellectually yet.
Anyway, some of the assumptions you made about women that we’re naturally nurturing etc – are disputable. Just because women act like that, doesn’t mean those are ‘natural’ or ‘immutable’ characteristics. After all, for many years, it served men’s interest for women to be mothering, empathetic types, do housework and child-bearing and stuff while they went out into the world. In this long-term context of inequality, how can you say these traits are natural?
Anyway, point of this is not to talk at you, but to ask you, have you read Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender. Are you the type of person that often changes your mind about things? If so, this could just be the book to do it.
Anyway, feel free to write back to me at raili.simojoki@gmail.com if you want to chat about it.
Cheers – Raili
Hello Raili
Many thanks for your email and your comments on my piece. I wrote it because I picked up from a number of women around me–all independent and successful–that they felt a deep discomfort with the women-in-combat decision, but could not really articulate why. I too felt that discomfort and developed the argument to try to explain it.
In my piece, although ostensibly attacking “feminism”, I was really defending one type of feminism, difference feminism, against another type, liberal feminism. I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of women who have emailed me in support, although aware that my arguments would attract criticism as well.
Perhaps my views have been too heavily shaped by my early participation in the peace movement, where women’s contribution was so influential. I admired the long-running Greenham Common protest in the UK, which was a women’s protest that excluded men and asserted “difference”.
In my article I was careful not to say that the differences are natural, in the biological sense, but arose out of women’s distinctive history, and that it is not right, and not helpful, to characterise that history as wholly determined by men and male structures, and that even while subordinated women developed their own cultures, life experiences and ways of negotiating the world. So it does not help to abandon all of that as merely the product of patriarchy because if you do then it not only denigrates what is distinctively female but also means the objective must be to emulate men. I always understood that one of the two principal objectives of the women’s movement was to change men.
Cordelia is a good friend of mine. I have read her book and admire her work a great deal.
MoreArt is a public art show in the City of Moreland. I took a bike tour of the Upfield train line with The Squeaky Wheel.
Crow chilling out at Coburg station.
When I get there, he’s being bullied by a gang (ie group) of young kids, who are loitering (ie waiting for the extremely Sunday Upfield train) and clearly amused by the crow. They’re like, ‘Can we touch you?’
‘No’, he mutters sullenly.
‘Why not? Aren’t we your friends?’ (giggling) ‘Yeah, aren’t we your bros?’
The crow seems unimpressed but it’s hard to tell cos he’s wearing that thing over his head.
He moves away from the kids, poking his beak into the vending machine, seeing what he can get.
Unsuccessful, he then pokes it into the garbage bin, prising out a juice box which he puts on the ground and looks at for a while before crushing it with his foot.
He then sits back down on the bench. I take this photo. Then a proper photographer guy from the council comes, takes a closer-up shot.
As I leave the kids are getting a group photo with the crow.
There’s a second crow on the opposite platform, but I don’t think they are friends.
Fugitive Piano by Michelle Robinson of arts collaboration andeverythinginbetween.
Quite romantic. Apparently they do performances too; the walking tour get treated to ‘The Entertainer’.
This is at Coburg Uniting Church, right near the shopping precinct. It’s basically a mould of the artist, Andrew Atchison, made with birdseed. The idea is that it’ll degrade over a number of weeks. He says he made sure he used a non-toxic glue (PVC? I can’t remember) so it didn’t poison the birds. He’d tried egg first but it didn’t work. He tells us that the piece symbolises the precarious predicament of non-indigenous artists within Australia, with the birds representing the pre-invasion landscape.
As we’re watching him earnestly, this car rolls on by, packed full of people. And the guy squeezed in the back on the side furtherest from us leans over his friend and yells, ‘YOU WANKERS YOU’RE ALL WANKERS!’ Which is kind of funny, but a bit sad at the same time. I note to my friend (well, the friend that I’d met on the tour), that it’s a bit sad that someone would be filled with that much hatred. He tells me he thinks the guy was joking.
Now. This is of my favourites.
I have such a hatred of anything contrived that sometimes it even limits me from trying new things. But anyway, you know what I like about this (apart from the art)? Sansern Rianthong, who came on the tour with us, explains that it was basically fucking depressing (I paraphrase, he was much more polite) riding down this bike track and looking at the boring fence all the time, so he decide to create a bit of life. With straws. It was as simple and as brilliant as that.
Right next to it:
FUCK THE FENCES FUCK THE BORDERS NO-ONE IS ILEGAL. Yeah, way to change someone’s mind about an issue. And may I stress, this was NOT part of the exhibition.
Honestly, there was a lot of great public art. You know how sometimes you go to these things and they’re just shit? I remember the last time I was in Perth, going to a Sculptures by the Sea in Cottesloe. And I couldn’t find any piece that I really identified with. Perhaps the nautical theme often really kills it. Sorry, Sculptures by the Sea, I like that you exist, I really do. I’m not advocating a withdrawal of your funding or anything. One day you will be great.
I could post more of the great art up here, but I don’t want to ruin the tour, and also, I know you all have short attention spans. Suffice to say that there was a lot of great train station art. There’s a bit of a thing in Melbourne with freeway art, but train stations remain dismal and boring. But what better place to look at art than when you’re waiting for the train? You’re a lot less likely to get distracted and cause an accident.
Even our iconic Flinders Street station, which there’s recently been talk of using for a hotel. Which is stupid. It should be somewhere where you can linger, meet up with people, not spend too much money. Somewhere for everyone. I’m thinking, like, the train station version of Fed Square, except way more vintage, and also wheelchair-friendly.
Anyway, MoreArt has two train station pieces that particularly grab my fancy. The first is Interface by HIVE. It’s installed in one of those barred ticket windows, and comments on the fact that many of our transactional interactions nowadays are conducted behind bars or perspex screens, which create a barrier between you and the person selling tickets or whatever, so you only see them in terms of their office, not as a person.
The other beauty is Looking Down the Line. A bluegrass band who recorded their music in a ticketing booth at Jewell station, and the tracks are now playing from the booth all day except between 11pm and 5am. The difference to the atmosphere is amazing. I ask the artist, Tobias Hengeveld what the name of his band was and where they perform, and he says they don’t have a name and they don’t perform but they do publicly jam at the Lomond hotel every Saturday evening.
I suggest to another of my newly-met friends that they should have music playing at train stations all the time. Yeah, she says, but knowing Metro they’d probably put on really annoying music.
I know it’d be difficult because people are often pretty sensitive when they’re commuting, especially in the morning probably, but perhaps they could get a different person to curate each day, make it a Melbourne thing. I guess one person’s ‘annoying’ is another’s epiphany.
Apparently a few years ago Metrotrains would only let the festival do art at one station, but now they’ve become a lot more lenient. Why the change of heart, I wonder? Anyway, it’s positive.
In summary, the tour is highly recommended and it won’t last forever. It’s happening in the next few weeks, details here.
