The changing nature of protest in Australia:
Historical reflections
On Tuesday 2nd November 2020 – Melbourne Cup Day – several hundred protesters assembled at Victoria’s Parliament House to protest against Melbourne’s COVID-19 restrictions. The most severe of those restrictions had been eased several days beforehand, but protesters remained unhappy, carrying placards that proclaimed: ‘Tell the Truth’, ‘Not Happy Dan’, ‘Masks Don’t Work’ and ‘Corona Hoax 1984’. There were more than 400 arrests, and a policewoman had her arm broken.
The literature on protest in Australia has been better on the socialists, peace activists, feminists and gays than on the kinds of people attracted to the anti-lockdown activity. These recent protests have attracted little sympathy from most Australians in 2020, but it is equally true that protest which cannot be
broadly marshalled under the banner of ‘progressive' has largely been ignored by historians more generally. It is given little weight by Clive Hamilton in his What Do We Want? The Story of Protest in Australia (2016), although he does turn briefly to ‘the Cronulla riots' of 2005 and anti-carbon tax protest in 2011.
Part of the problem here is that those who write about protest are also narrating either their own lives or their own sympathies. Hamilton's illustrated book, published by the National Library of Australia, struggles to integrate protest that is not obviously ‘progressive', partly because this is a story of ‘us' rather than of ‘them'.
In the book's preface, he includes a mug-shot of himself in his second-last year at high school, explaining that he was ‘a foot soldier in several of the protest movements here described'. ‘For many of the young people caught up in those heady times', Hamilton continues, ‘the protests defined us. We felt we were making the world a better place, and we were'. 1
This understanding of political protest in Australia links it to a wider social movement activity, but also to fundamental transformations in modern Australia. Sean Scalmer, in an academic study of such protest, points to the key role of the ‘political gimmick' – an elusive category but one that draws attention to the repertoire of protest and the use of the staged event as a means of drawing media attention.
Scalmer too, is largely concerned with protest activities that we might label ‘progressive'. For instance, while drawing attention to the manner in which public support for Pauline Hanson's One Nation was staged through media polls of ‘dubious authority', he is primarily concerned with the anti-hanson movement's use of ‘contestational gathering': that is, protesters' efforts to disrupt meetings of the One Nation Party around the country. 2
The 60s revolution
In these approaches to protest, there is a modern lineage that often begins in the 1960s, and protest is centred on a range of matters that became of growing concern during that era. The Vietnam War occupies an honoured position, but it sits alongside antiApartheid activism, as well as protests in favour of the rights of women, gays and First Nations people, and protest aimed at protecting the environment.
Interestingly, anti-white Australia protest and anti-hanging protests – perhaps because both were largely over by the late 1960s – have a less prominent place in collective memory of this era's protest history. This is largely in keeping with a broader tendency to recall 1960s protest in terms of the expressive, boisterous politics of late in the decade rather than the more restrained efforts of the early 1960s, before neat suits and tweed skirts had given way to jeans and headbands.
Protest of the 1960s and 1970s had a transnational dimension that has been explored by Jon Piccini, among others. Black Power in the United States
Protest which cannot be broadly marshalled under the banner of ‘progressive’ has largely been ignored by historians.
greatly influenced emergent Australian Indigenous protest, such as the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra from 26 January 1972.
Australian student protest of the era was superficially aligned with Chairman Mao and the Third World: Piccini refers to one Australian student, just back from China, facing a university disciplinary hearing in Brisbane ‘in full Chinese workers dress – blue cotton tunic, matching cap, two-inch square Mao badge, and well-thumbed Little Red Book'. But Australian student
3
protest also (and more commonly) had a distinctive very American inflection.
Frank Knopfelmacher, the anticommunist academic, mischievously called the gay academic and activist Dennis Altman, who had done postgraduate work in the United States and been involved with gay liberation there, ‘an agent of US cultural imperialism', an accusation Altman does not deny.
4
There is often a sense in historical and everyday references to protest of previously effective forms – much is invested in the anti-vietnam War moratoriums of the early 1970s – enjoying only a declining purchase as we enter the age of neoliberalism, the internet and social media.
The social movement protest of the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s remains paradigmatic. It is a story that begins, perhaps, with the student Freedom Riders of 1965, travelling by bus to New South Wales country towns to protest racism, and might end with the massive anti-nuclear protests of the 1980s. Its repertoires were geared increasingly toward television, the natural technology for the ‘political gimmick' defined by Scalmer. But from that point on, global transformations in communications technology, media ownership, governance and ideology shifted the ground on which protest could happen.
40,000 farmers protested outside Parliament House in Canberra. The biggest demonstration Canberra had ever seen, however, has not registered at all in the national collective memory of protest.
The forgotten protests
What do we miss when we consider protest in terms of a lineage and chronology of this kind? First, as I've already indicated, there is a great deal of protest that simply doesn't map on to the progressive – ‘this is the story of us' – template.
What do we do, for instance, with rural protest? This has taken many forms, such as dairy farmers pouring milk down the drain to protest inadequate prices. There were large protests of the 1930s Depression-era which opposed governments in Canberra and Sydney and sometimes took the form of demands for new states in places such as the Riverina and New England.
The 1980s also saw much rural protest, at a time of declining incomes for many farmers. On the first day – 1 July – of the Hawke Government's tax summit in 1985, 40,000 farmers protested outside Parliament House in
Canberra. The biggest demonstration Canberra had ever seen, however, has not registered at all in the national collective memory of protest.
There are limitations to the modernist emphasis of much work. Protest was not invented by Baby Boomers who wanted to change the world. There were traditions of individual and collective protest among the convicts that have been thoroughly explored by historians – including the violent armed uprising at Castle Hill, near Sydney, in 1804, which was brutally suppressed by authorities.
Historians such as Terry Irving and Sean Scalmer are rewriting the birth of democracy in Australia not as having occurred in a fit of absence of mind, but as the result of political agitation and protest. White ‘democratic' and ‘radical' protest on the goldfields was against the license tax – ‘good protest' in Australia's left tradition – but also took the form of violent demonstrations against Chinese. There is, moreover, a long culture of petitioning deployed not only by white settlers but also First Nations people and goldfields Chinese.
Much protest in Australia before the middle of the twentieth century was also framed by other identities that have now largely passed into history. English constitutionalism was powerful, well into the twentieth century. People who protested in Australia – and not only white settlers – appealed to their status as ‘freeborn Englishmen' or ‘Britons' whose rights were guaranteed by ‘the Ancient Constitution' and ‘Magna Carta'.
When the Aboriginal activist William Cooper protested against the treatment of Indigenous people in the 1930s, his appeal was, in part, to ‘British' justice. Revolutionary ideas indebted to the Americans and French were generally weak in Australia, although not absent. The miners' movement on the Ballarat goldfields that culminated in the Eureka Stockade battle of 3 December 1854 had among its slogans ‘no taxation without representation', borrowed from the American revolutionary tradition.
But leaving aside the more radical positions adopted by antipodean protesters from time to time, the notion that protest might be necessary to preserve one's rights against the encroachment of master (employer) or governor was deeply embedded in the culture of settler Australia from its early years.
Touch one, touch all
The place of trade unions in the story of protest in Australia is also underplayed in the ‘modern' emphasis. Unions played a leading role in probably the most vigorous and successful protest movement in Australian history, that directed against conscription in the First World War.
The Eureka Stockade battle of 3 December 1854 had among its slogans ‘no taxation without representation', borrowed from the American revolutionary tradition.
As money runs out many problems will arise and the reaction of the trade unions has to be considered. There are threats of protest strikes and industrial “war”.
Sir John Kerr
Just as it was a virtual absence of labour movement protest that was responsible for Australia, unlike the nations of Europe, committing to war without mass protest, it was the unions whose protests ensured that Australia was nearly unique in having no system of conscription for the entire war.
Unions, representing well over half of the paid workforce and often responsive to the new social movements, remained central to Australian society – and to protest – in the 1970s. Early in the decade, environmental groups and the labour movement came together in the famous Green Bans, when the militant New South Wales Builders' Labourers Federation and resident groups cooperated to oppose the destruction of the natural environment and built heritage by property developers.
Orthodox accounts of major events in Australian history such as the dismissal of the Whitlam Government remain inadequate because they take too little account of the role of trade union protest; these rarely move beyond the observation that Bob Hawke, as Australian Council of Trade Unions President, resisted calls for a general strike. Yet protest strikes did occur and there was fear within the Liberal Party that union action would be fierce in the event of the destruction of a Labor Government by its opponents via unorthodox means.
In early November 1975, Liberal MP Ian Macphee warned Malcolm Fraser that the union movement ‘would feel justified in destroying our government as they believe the Senate destroyed their government'. The confrontation involved, he said, ‘is frightening to contemplate'. 5
In the recently released ‘Palace Letters', Sir John Kerr expressed similar fears to the Queen's private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris in mid-october: ‘ The situation is very serious indeed. As money runs out many problems will arise and the reaction of the trade unions has to be considered. There are threats of protest strikes and industrial “war”.' 6
Some recent analysis sees the Accord between the Hawke Labor Government and the unions of the 1980s as critical in taming the labour movement. 7
From the 1990s, a more restrictive legal environment, enterprise bargaining, and deunionisation all reduced the capacity of the unions to lead wider forms of social protest.
Nonetheless, unions spearheaded opposition to the newly-minted Kennett Government's radical spending cuts and industrial relations reforms in 1992. The 100,000 on the streets on 10 November 1992, a protest organised by Victoria's Trades Hall, was ‘the biggest public demonstration since the Vietnam War'. 8
There was a vigorous culture of protest in Melbourne during these years. Community members, including
students themselves, protested school closures by occupying buildings and conducting rebel schools. Residents protested the conversion of Albert Park into a race track for the Formula One Grand Prix. Many were arrested for interfering with construction. The Save Albert Park group adopted the yellow ribbon as their symbol, tying it around trees in the park that were to be removed to make way for the race. Melbourne residents quietly displayed yellow ribbons outside their homes.
Unions were increasingly likely to participate in social protest of this kind as partners rather than the leaders and organisers they had once been. The union movement's successful campaign against the Howard Government's Workchoices legislation in 2005-2007 – called Your Rights at Work – disclosed capacities that some thought beyond a much-reduced union movement. But the campaign, while downplaying rallies and marches, deployed community engagement and clever marketing that emphasised threats to the vulnerable. Not all of these methods were entirely novel for the unions, but there was a strong sense of a break with the dominant modes of past activity. The union movement, however, has struggled to build on the undoubted success of this intelligent, focused and defensive campaign. 9
Changing times; changing tactics
The protest movements that emerged in the context of the rise of social movements in the 1970s and 1980s also found the more conservative environment of the period following the Cold War, a challenging one to navigate. The so-called second-wave feminism had been successful in dramatising inequality through protests such as women chaining themselves to the public bar of the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane, or the Arbitration Commission in Melbourne.
Women involved in these and other recognisably traditional forms of protest soon moved into positions of influence within politics, government and administration, giving rise to the ‘femocrat', and measures such as the Sex Discrimination Act 1984. The more conservative political environment of the period from the mid-1990s, however, reduced opportunities for influence in these quarters.
Environmental activists followed a
One of the popular protest rituals was the ‘die-in’… which even involved Young Liberals in 1986 who had permission from their party.
roughly similar course. The tactic of the ‘blockade' – the disruption of the building of the Gordon-below-franklin Dam in Tasmania – succeeded, in large part, because of a change of government in Canberra in March 1983. But this could only occur because protest in defence of Tasmania's wilderness had gradually helped transform public opinion on the mainland.
The Tasmanian Wilderness Society used arrests of the protestors – including the leader Dr Bob Brown – as a tool to gain national media publicity. Other environmental protestors have used similar tactics, with varying levels of success, but as with the feminist movement there was a trend toward working within the formal structures of politics, and even within government itself, as environmental activists became political staffers in Labor governments.
Again, the opportunities for such influence declined after Labor's federal defeat in 1996.
Peace and anti-war protest seemed to be of declining effectiveness. The massive scale of Australia's anti-nuclear Palm Sunday rallies of the mid-1980s are not well appreciated. With their celebrity participation, music and street theatre, these too were described as ‘the biggest rallies since the days of the Vietnam moratorium campaign'. 10
The police estimate of the Sydney march in 1984 was 100,000 – journalists thought 130,000 – and across Australia perhaps a quarter of a million turned out. 11
One of the popular protest rituals was the ‘die-in', involving protestors falling to the ground at the sound of a whistle. But these had become a very orderly and respectable form of protest, which even involved Young Liberals in 1986 who had permission from their party to march provided they displayed a banner supporting ‘multilateral verifiable disarmament'. No wonder punks were complaining that the march ‘was too orderly'. It was losing its vigour and
12 urgency as Cold War tensions declined in the second half of the decade.
The failure of protests against Australia's commitment to the Iraq War – as part of the so-called coalition of the willing led by the United States – stood as a rebuke to a later generation: why could they not emulate the supposed successes of the Moratorium marches?
The question was, of course, unfair, since history might rhyme but it does not repeat itself. The Moratoriums of 1970 and 1971 had the wind in their sails, for Australia was already running down its involvement in the war, in line with shifting US policy. The protests of 2003 confronted Anglosphere governments that were not for turning, to the extent that they proved willing to commit gross forms of deception on their citizens to maintain the momentum toward war.
Still, there has been a sense that something important about protest changed in the early years of the present century. The S11 anti-globalisation protests again the World Economic Forum at Melbourne's Crown Casino (11-13 September 2000) seemed to represent a departure in terms of their ‘global' character – they were inspired by protests in 1999 against the World Trade
Organization in Seattle, Washington – as well as in their use of the internet.
But there was much that was traditional about these protests, too. They often had a carnival or party atmosphere, which recalled both gay rights protest – such as the Mardi Gras, which commenced in 1978 with mass arrests – and anti-nuclear protests. There was also the preoccupation of the mainstream media and political class with whether the S11 protests would be ‘violent' – which, as it happened, was followed up with brutal police violence against demonstrators.
Modern revolt
Yet for all the condemnation those blockading Crown received at the time, in retrospect these protests from the left look like the harbingers of a much more widespread revolt against globalisation in the west that would eventually gain its most spectacular successes on the right. 13
Social media would be critical to that right-wing populist revolt, weak in Australia, but powerful and transformative in the United States and Britain. Facebook, Youtube and Twitter were founded in 2004, 2005 and 2006 respectively but the early promise of social media – epitomised by the Arab Spring of 2011 and, in Australia, dramatised by some of the campaigning successes of Getup! – have largely degenerated into well-founded worry about the capacity of conservative forces to manipulate public opinion.
The internet and social media are unquestionably important spaces for modern social protest, but their muchcriticised echo-chamber effect can produce the very opposite mobilising effect of collective action associated with older forms of protest.
Few doubt that the future of protest lies partly and perhaps even largely online. In many instances, traditional forms of protest such as the petition have been reinvigorated by the web and social media: as I write,
Kevin Rudd has managed to gain over half a million signatures on a petition calling for a royal commission into the influence of the Murdoch media in Australia – resulting in a Senate inquiry on media diversity in Australia.
Yet the populist surge of the recent past, at least in the United States, as well as the resistance to it, have been associated with the old-style rally and march as much as with Twitter. The impulse of anti-lockdown protesters to assemble in Melbourne has been integral to their purpose of demonstrating against a government that wishes to keep them apart and at home.
The repertoires of protest in Australia have been changed by new digital technologies, but the rally or march remains resilient and protest movements continue to need to engage with traditional forms of media.
Movements such as Change the Date – which oppose the 26th January being celebrated as Australia Day – have successfully deployed the traditional spectacle of the protest march and rally to denaturalise the idea of the British settlement of Australia as the nation's foundational story.
Meanwhile, the engagement with public monuments and statues inspired by the Rhodes Must Fall movement is not only global in its orientation, it can also be seen as an adaptation of a very old tradition of iconoclasm, or image-breaking.
Like so much of social life, protest in Australia looks often backward as it searches for new worlds to conquer.