Occupy Melbourne

My city is textured. Every street and corner, every skyline, every space, it seems, brings to me a memory of another event or time that was violent or emotional enough to imprint itself on my consciousness. I walk past a tram stop where I once sat watching for cops as my comrades hung a banner from an empty building. I see from the window a street that I used to skate along on my way to Uni classes. I shiver as I remember punches and arguments thrown in a park. This week I have added a few more memorable moments to my mental map of Melbourne. And after Friday I will never look at the City Square in the same way.

I want to try and record what happened here before it becomes muddied by the collective hysteria of media headlines, and the collaborative confusion of collective recall. So here is how Occupy Melbourne happened for me. On Saturday the 15^th of October, on a day when thousands of people in hundreds of cities around the world were doing the same, I went down to City Square on the tram to check out the Melbourne demonstration of solidarity with the Occupy Wall St protest. I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw – a general assembly was in place, with a facilitation team that included people who I knew and respected from other well organised actions that I’ve participated in. Approximately 250 people from all walks of life, many of them unfamiliar faces to me, were engaged in a moderated conversation about process and principles. This was not the run of the mill stereotypical demonstration that I had expected, dominated by cliché and tired politics. It seemed that something fresh was brewing, and I was inspired by the potential that this had to reach beyond the converted and out to the passers by. So I returned home, packed a backpack, and headed back to the square with a sleeping bag.

I spent the next 7 days participating in what I now regard as one of the most daring and open minded Direct Actions that I have ever been a part of. I joined the logistics working group, and used my knowledge of tents and ropes to help establish the camp, building shelters for the media team, fixing tents for the Indigenous mob, setting up the Anarchist book store out of milk crates, and rigging tarps to protect us all from the rain. The first night was a little hairy, and I lay down to sleep slightly worried about the possible responses from drunk partygoers. But after a peaceful night, I awoke fresh and ready to continue collaborating with the others on-site, who seemed to grow each day. Another team had quickly established a functioning kitchen, taking donations of food from well wishers, and feeding protestors, office workers and the homeless alike. I volunteered for a shift on the info desk and as security, and that afternoon was pleased to see another general assembly take place, again with around 250-300 people. Just imagine, for a second, what I am speaking of. 300 people, unaffiliated to each other aside from their commitment to this moment, and to the idea of a better world, sitting with each other discussing the way forward, and how to work with and for each other. By Sunday night I was convinced that this was a space of incredible potential, even if some of my Anarchist colleagues had dismissed it as being too ‘liberal’ or ‘reformist’ for working with the Police and the Council to obtain permission for the occupation.

What I could see was that this was quickly turning into a space where people felt good about investing their time, energy and ideas for no gain other than the advancement of collective endeavour. A true public space, built along radical democratic lines. A commonly cited principle in Anarchist organising is that the ends should never be allowed to justify the means, and although Occupy Melbourne was affiliated to no political party or creed, I felt that our commitment to creating an open public space was central to our overarching message of needing more participation in our supposedly democratic society. Thus I was very pleased when some bright soul painted and erected a sign declaring the square as “The Democratic Republic of Melbourne – a Police Free Zone”. It wasn’t quite the Paris commune, but I felt that we as a steadily growing group were working towards a goal that envisioned a new society celebrating participation, equality, responsibility and autonomy. Even at this early stage there were many critiques coming forward that the Occupy Melbourne movement couldn’t articulate what it was that we wanted, but I genuinely feel that these critiques were made, on the most part, by those commentators unwilling or unable to invest themselves in the Square and see from the inside what we were developing. The media certainly wanted to hang us from a slogan, but the best that they were given was the idea, drawn from the American movement, that we represented the 99% of the population excluded from the decision making processes of our society.

As such the positions of those in the camp were many and varied. Some said it was about poverty, some about greed, some about democratic participation. To me it seemed that it was entirely possible for all these issue to remain somewhat unarticulated, bundled as they were into the forceful consciousness that ‘this world is not right and it must be fixed’. Occupy Melbourne then was a process rather than a protest. Every evening the General Assembly convened and continued this discussion about how and when and why to articulate this frustration with our sick society, where the interests of business and lobby groups take precedence over the rights of the people, and where party politics has become an arrogant and irrelevant media driven cycle of fear and bigotry. A crucial moment for me was a particularly heated General Assembly where different people were arguing about the use of the word ‘scumbags’ when describing corporations (and in theory their employees). The argument was concerned with semantics, and quickly lost its way, but what grabbed me was that after the Assembly had finished, almost every single person in the 300 strong group turned to their neighbour and began a conversation. Circles formed, and as I walked through the crowd to help do the dishes from the free meal we’d all been treated to, I felt an immense sense of pride that Occupy Melbourne was an all too rare space of unmediated discussion and debate in Australia.

It is little wonder then that by the week’s end, there was increasing talk of eviction. The Lord Mayor, Robert Doyle, who is cartoonishly grotesque in appearance, and often violently ignorant in his public proclamations, began his media war against the camp, saying that we had made our point, and that businesses in the area were beginning to suffer. No mention of the fact that those business occupy what was once (before its redevelopment) unambiguously public space. Or that aside from some of our structures not having permits, that we were breaking no laws with our occupation. However our media spokesperson made an unfortunate tactical mistake on Thursday the 20^th, under pressure on John Faine’s talkback show, when he declared that if asked to leave the protestors would leave peacefully. This was an error because it had certainly not been agreed to in any Assembly or meeting. If anything the overriding feeling in camp was that we would stay and defend our right to use public space. But this statement by Nick Carson damaged our credibility in the eyes and mouths of our opponents in what was to come. On the morning of Friday the 21^st, we were given a notice of eviction at approximately 7.30am, to be enforced from 9am. I’d stayed off site that night, and I rushed into town as quickly as I could, to find a fence being erected around the square that would eventually cordon off the protestors from the street. Jumping into the square from a high ledge I ran to join the others gathered around the kitchen tent, and began building a barricade to provide some protection for our stand against the police.

Non violence is an interesting doctrine to name check when protesting because it can be so flexible in the mouths of others. To some, resisting the use of illegitimate force, i.e. the state sanctioned force used by the police to remove citizens from a public space, is violent in itself. Certainly the media failed to draw a distinction between the brutality of the police and the peaceful resistance and civil disobedience of the protestors, describing the scenes as ‘chaos’ and ‘madness’, and relating that the peaceful protest had turned violent when we were evicted. This is an incredibly disingenuous response to be expected from a media that bases its reports of the words and wishes of those holding their leash. On the contrary, the protest remained non-violent, even as violence was introduced by the police into the situation. Being dragged away because you have gone limp is not violence. Blocking traffic and an intersection, to me, is also non-violent. Having been a part of the G20 riots back in 2006, when some protestors actively challenged with force the police’ control of contested space, I am since been painfully aware of how slippery it can be for a movement that desires to articulate radical political alternatives to hold the high moral ground. In these situations the use of force by the protestors seems to serve only as confirmation for the general public of the shallowness of the message behind the protest. 

On the other hand, on Friday the 21^st, as the Police publically humiliated and brutalised peaceful protestors, I was struck by the immediate and vivid response from people who were looking on. One young man in a suit and tie had stopped on his way to work and begun filming with his camera phone. Looking at the tears in my eyes, he expressed exactly the same disbelief and shame that I was feeling with a few simple words. “How can they be doing this?”

The thing that often gets deliberately emphasised about these actions, is the relatively narrow demographic limits on those who participate. Activists tend to be young, often with University educations and funny haircuts. But not all of them. During the week at Occupy Melbourne, I met and befriended trade unionists, staunch older citizens, indigenous activists, and men who were homeless or long term unemployed. All of these people contributed to the central message of our movement, that our democracy is broken, and it must be fixed. If, on the day of our eviction, the TV images mostly showed young men and women being dragged away, that is not to say that there were not hundreds of others of all demographics gathered behind us. All week I have been reading letters in the paper from people around Melbourne who say that they were pleased to see the protest happening, although they weren’t able to join themselves. In some sense it is for the young and the fit to take up the cause of radical struggle on behalf of those caught more firmly in the web of mainstream society. And hopefully as we do so, we can create a groundswell of support to convince those people to rise up against their own bonds, to leave their job even for a day, to speak up about what makes them angry and passionate, and to resist the spell put on us by the constant sucking of capital and consumerism.

The result of Friday’s eviction was never in doubt. Using horses, dogs, riot cops, pepper-spray and random violent arrests, the Police gradually cleared the streets and forced us away from City Square where we had made our home. But in the long run I feel that their ‘decisive response’ will be their own undoing. I for one have never had any love for the police, but that day I saw people who had previously argued for sympathy and compromise turn against what they had perceived as a State willing to negotiate with those bent on tearing it down. There is nothing more radicalising than watching a fanatic brute Pig wielding a badge and a gun, acting like a violent psychopath and realising that this force is condoned and endorsed by the state, and that at its heart this is the fundamental strength on which the state continues to exist. More than one mind caught on fire that day, and I believe that if this freedom comes at the cost of our dignity on just one afternoon, then it is a unmistakeable win. For we will fight on!