Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

In September 2000, the World Economic
Forum (WEF), a group of the world’s
largest corporations and some of the richest
people on the planet, met in Melbourne.
Some 15,000 people came out to greet
them, blockading their meeting for three
days. The venue, appropriately enough,
was the wonderful symbolic Crown Casino,
on the banks of the Yarra River. There was
months of planning, hundreds of meetings,
until, finally the day arrived. The backdrop
to these protests was the growth of the
the global anti-corporate globalisation
movement, and a strong sense that this was
Australia’s big day on ‘the stage’.
6am, Monday, September 11th – s11.
Finally, it’s here. But its not as I had
imagined. We hid under a giant banner, the
rain literally pounding down on our heads.
The cops had bolted for cover. The towers
of the Crown Casino loomed over-head,
faintly malevolent in the cold of pre-dawn
Melbourne.
I peered out from under the banner and
could count barely 200 people. Someone
with a megaphone was berating people to
start blockading, and some were obliging,
stopping commuters on their way to work.
I looked for an escape route, wondered if
I could slink away, and felt a sudden and
terrible panic. Had we totally misread the
feeling of people towards the WEF, getting
so caught in our own rhetoric that we hadn’t
realised that maybe no-one else would
show Rain kept hammering the banner. It
was so cold. I tried to think of a positive
media spin.
A couple of hours later, I walked the
circumference of the Crown Complex,
thousands of people cheerfully blockading
every entrance. It felt like a giant film set,
as I wandered from a Mad Max scene to
Christians praying, to unionists talking to
security guards, old fashioned communists
alternating with skate punks. The sense of
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theatre, goodwill and determination was
remarkable. The sun started to come out.
Even the cops looked happy. Maybe I won’t
get any ulcers, afterall.
The global mantra from that year goes
‘Seattle, Washington, Melbourne, Prague’.
It was a highpoint in the world wide
mobilisations against corporate-defined
globalisation, before the September 11
attacks on the USA and the second war on
Iraq. And while Melbourne isn’t as well
known around the world as the others, the
reality is that more than 15,000 people
came out to blockade the WEF; not bad
for a country of our size and population.
Busloads came from Northern NSW,
unionists from Sydney and Adelaide, forest
campaigners from WA, delegations from
rural towns. For months afterwards, in the
most unlikely situations, people would say
‘yes, I was there’. Despite what the Herald
Sun said, it wasn’t just the feral contingents,
it was remarkably broad-based, diverse and
determined.
In that time, we felt some of the most intense
police violence Australia had seen for many
years. Following a baton charge on the
second evening, people with head injuries
had to catch taxis to hospital because there
were too many casualties for the ambulances
to handle. We were, of course, vilified by
the media (the Herald Sun, in particular, got
very confused about the difference between
news reporting and opinions). But we also
felt incredible community support. A last
minute decision to finish the blockade with
a march through the city was an excellent
move, and was more like a celebration
parade than a street march.
FoE played a key role before, during and
after the WEF protests. We worked to
build alliances with the more conservative
NGOs and collaborated on various preconferences,
marches and events. We were
a key part of the S11 alliance, the grouping
FoE 30 Years 89