Just worked that out; Google Groups is doing some evil web-app bullshit and doesn’t appear to offer any way to functionally link. So, bugger it: full text below, in two posts for length. Most of the links will be dead, but I’ve left 'em in for nostalgia value.
[quote]'Kay…I promised assorted folks that I’d eventually do a write-up of what actually went on out at Woomera, so here it is. Before I get into it though, a few points:
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This is a completely subjective account, written as accurately as I can remember it. It was a hectic, emotionally intense and stressful week, so don’t be surprised if I get a minor detail wrong here and there, and some of what I write here is going to be of interest only to me and my friends; I’m writing this for my own records as much as anything else. Opinions expressed about particular groups are just that: my opinions. Bring your own grain of salt.
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This is an account of what happened from my point of view, not a piece of advocacy for the causes behind it all. If you’re interested in the issues behind it, see http://www.boat-people.org and other such sites. See http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/woomera-archive.php3 for more accurate news of what happened out there than you’ll get in the mainstream media, including pictures, sound files and interviews with escaped refugees. http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/woomera-features.php3#woom1 is a good starting point for a day-by-day look at what happened there.
(Note, however, that Indymedia is an open publishing website. Literally anyone can post a story there, and there’s very little editorial control, so there’s usually a fair bit of blatant bullshit on any indymedia site. However, as far as I can see, their Woomera info is accurate)
- The Woomera action was a convergence, not a single-group action. What this means is that there wasn’t any “organising committee” or overall leadership; it was a collection of highly diverse groups and individuals, all out their with their own goals and philosophies. There were spokescouncils within the camp to try and achieve some sort of organisation and consensus, but the decisions reached at those councils were in no way binding on anyone.
Anyway…
I’d arrived at Woomera a day early, and spent that time (Wednesday) checking out the town itself and going out to the opal mining town of Andamooka. I detailed that bit in the main trip report, but it eventually ended up with myself and four people I’d met during the day camping above the saltpan south of Pimba. Come morning (Thursday), we split up again; Pixie & Lenny (the guys who’d hitched from Port Augusta) set out first to hitch a lift into Woomera; I got moving about half an hour after them, while the couple who’d ridden from Adelaide on pushbikes stayed above the saltpan to sleep in.
There were a couple of folks at the Pimba roadhouse giving directions to the camp; I stayed with them for a bit to wait and see if Pixie & Lenny would catch up with me anytime soon (I’d passed them on the road, still trying to hitch a lift). Eventually I gave up and headed out to the camp on my own. See http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=24909&group=webcast for a few maps showing the layout of where we were.
The internment camp is a couple of kilometres outside of Woomera town, along the road to Roxby Downs. There were about 40 people or so there when I arrived, busy setting up the medical, legal & indymedia tents in the area we’d chosen to camp in, by the side of the road a few hundred metres away from the camp gate. This was shortly followed by a visit from half a dozen APS (Australian Protective Services; Federal Police) officers, who handed out bits of paper notifying us that we were trespassing on Commonwealth land and that we could be arrested and removed at their whim. One of them tried to read it out to us, but gave up once he realised that no-one was paying any attention to him.
After that, we had a small meeting where we found out that the Woomera Area Administrator had set aside an area for us to camp in, claiming that he didn’t want us camping where we were for environmental reasons. However, the area he’d set aside was an abandoned football field two kilometres further away from the internment camp, and just happened to be surrounded by a high fence with only one narrow way in or out, so it would have been ridiculously easy for a handful of police to bottle us up in there. Having to walk a couple of kilometres each way through the screaming hot desert also would’ve put the damper on the protests a touch.
The “environmental reasons” were complete bullshit; the piece of land we were camped on by the roadside was already heavily degraded and was connected to the internment camp by the road, whereas if we’d gone to the site they wanted us to then there would have been a couple of thousand people stomping several times a day across the less-degraded land further down the hill which was what they were claiming they were trying to protect.
The other reason why we wanted to stay where we were was because the semitrailer sized water tanker that some of the Melbourne groups had organised had already been delivered, couldn’t be moved except by the driver who delivered it, and the driver wouldn’t be back for a week. We didn’t want to leave it alone because it would’ve been ridiculously easy to sabotage (just turn the tap on without doing the valves properly) and that would’ve left the guys who’d organised it facing a huge bill (up to tens of thousands of dollars) to fix it, plus costing us the water we needed to maintain the camp.
Later on I pottered back into Woomera town and ran into Pixie & Lenny again, along with Pixie’s friend Rufie. We sat around having lunch and talking in a park in town for an hour or so, then went to return to the camp. Just as I was about to get on my bike, however, I was stopped by a couple of SA police, who made me tell them my name and address, checked out my bike rego and questioned me for a few minutes about what I was there for, whether or not I knew if a couple of specific people were coming, and whether I was carrying any “whacky tobaccy”. I kept it mellow & friendly the whole time, and eventually they let me go.
Once back out at the camp, I found that things had progressed somewhat. The authorities were still insisting that we couldn’t camp there, and had given us a half an hour deadline to move. There was some discussion about whether we should try and stay or just give it up and go back to either the football field or the Pimba roadhouse, since we didn’t have the numbers to hold onto the site if they tried to physically chuck us off. It was eventually decided to move if it came down to a fight, but to try and hold onto the campsite for as long as possible first. So, we stalled.
We managed to turn that half an hour deadline into about five hours of negotiation. At one stage during this, a bus full of kids returning into the internment camp from school in town (some of the kids in the camp are schooled in town; I don’t think it’s all of them, and I don’t think they’re in the same classes as the town kids) passed us by, and the kids inside waved and cheered and yelled out “Freedom”.
The authorities were still insisting that we couldn’t stay there, but seemed reluctant to boot us off physically (the fact that there were already several TV crews there probably had a bit to do with this). However, they finally gave us another half-hour deadline to take down the tents (we still only had the first aid etc. tents up, cos we thought they’d move in more forcefully if we made it obvious we planned on staying all night) or have them taken down for us and possibly confiscated. Two of the three tents were rented and the guy who rented them didn’t want to risk it, so we took those down, but the first-aid tent was deemed expendable by the guy who’d brought it, so we left it up and told the authorities that we’d need it there no matter which campsite we used, because people might need medical attention during the protests, and the protest actions were going to be here, near the internment camp.
Eventually half a dozen APS folks came in and pulled the tent down, accompanied by a lot of jeering, catcalls and photographs. They didn’t confiscate it, however. The afternoon progressed into continuous negotiations, stalling, and attempts by the police to intimidate us away. Every now and then they’d form up a line of riot police with shields etc., then they’d send the riot guys away without using them when it became obvious that we weren’t going to be scared off unless they actually started thumping people.
More people were arriving throughout the afternoon and evening, although there still probably wasn’t more than a hundred of us all up, and eventually it looked like the police had given up and were going to let us stay. We arranged the cars into a sort of “wagon-circle” formation to make it harder for them to scatter us with a quick riot troop or mounted police charge, everyone chucked in a bit of food and a huge pot of curry was made, then people tossed their bedrolls out on the ground and got comfy. A mild, laid-back party began; folks had been travelling a long way, and were mostly fairly knackered, so it was just sitting around talking and drinking with quiet music in the background. It had been going for a few hours and a significant portion of the crowd were well lubricated (and the media had left for the night), when the APS (Federal police) made a serious push at us.
I was fairly pissed myself by then; I’d been on the road nearly a week already (so I was knackered and feeling in need of a drink) and was surrounded by folks that I mostly didn’t know (so I was a touch nervous and drinking a bit faster than I normally would). I was okay when it was just lying around and talking, but once the police came in we had to jump up and get together so that they couldn’t pick us off one by one. I was alright during the first raid, but by the time the second one came through the alcohol had taken its toll; by the third raid, I was nice an’ comfy lying on the ground watching people run around me, and after that Rufie tossed me and my stuff in the back of his van to sleep it off.
The raids seemed to be an attempt to boot us off altogether, as well as being aimed at arresting a few specific individuals. They didn’t get anyone, however; a couple of people got grabbed and had those zip-tie plastic handcuffs put on them, but they were rapidly grabbed back by us and cut out of them. There was a bit of pushing and shoving, but no actual blows thrown as far as I saw; the people recovered were recovered by literally grabbing them back, not by thumping the police who’d taken them.
Come the morning, we were still there. More people were rolling in during the day, including about five coachloads of people from Brisbane, Sydney & Melbourne, and our numbers were growing fast. After assorted lengthy spokescouncil meetings, we started setting up camp properly, and dealing with the joy of trying to get tentpegs into the ground around there, which is either sand or rock; nothing in between. It usually took at least half a dozen attempts to get the tentpegs past the buried rocks, and I eventually gave up on a few of them, tying bits of my tent down to heavy pieces of gear instead.
The crowd was mostly much more “radical” than I am; this is a completely unreliable estimate, but to me it looked as if it was about 25% socialist/communist groups (ISO, Resistance, Spartacists etc.), 25% anarchists (punk/techno types; the sorta folks you find at Reclaim the Streets or Organarchy events), 25% feral/hippy sorts (Forest blockaders & Rainbow Tribe), and 25% just-plain-folks (ie: me). The just-plain-folks were harder to spot than the rest, however, 'cos they tended to be less organised and much less vocal at the spokescouncil meetings, and after a few days in the desert everyone was looking equally scruffy. The radical-bias of the crowd wasn’t surprising; it’s part of the reason why the camp is out there. Generally speaking, only the radicals have the commitment to travel all the way across the desert to get out there; most of the moderates are too apathetic to do it. There were a few unionist groups & a few Greens (there individually rather than representing the party) but no visible Democrat or major party representation at all. The crowd was mostly young & white, but there were people there aged up to 60 or so, and there were a few Arabic speakers in the camp (which came in handy later on).
More and more police were rolling in all day, and they were constantly videotaping us. At one stage during the day, I saw a van come in marked “Police Technical Support Unit”; I think these were the folks in charge of the nightvision scopes and things that they were using later on.
Later that day someone who had contacts inside the camp told us that the refugees were planning a protest action of their own that day; they were going to be standing on the roofs of their buildings waving banners and making as much noise as possible, in the hope that we’d be able to see and hear them. We all trooped off to the front gate, but the wind was blowing strongly (the wind was very strong for the first few days; there were continuous duststorms that sent tons of dust into everything; eyes, lungs, tents) towards the camp, so we couldn’t hear anything. We could see some banners in the distance, though, and we all yelled our heads off in the hope that they’d hear us.
The middle of the day turned into more lengthy spokescouncil meetings, and more and more people arriving during the day. By the end of the day we would’ve had a bit over 1,000 people. However, eventually I got sick of sitting around listening to spokescouncil arguments continuously going around in circles, and I wandered into Woomera town with Pixie and a friend of his to poke around and see if the supermarket was still open.
Woomera was even freakier than usual; it was a total ghost town. The only people moving around in town at all were police driving back and forth from the internment camp, but there were plenty of them. The shops turned out to be closed (it was about 5pm), so we wandered back out to the camp. As we approached, we saw that most of the protestors had headed off overland, around the police roadblock towards the back of the centre; most of the people were up the front, but there were still plenty of stragglers when we caught up with them.
We walked a kilometre or so before we got to the fence, and by the time I got there it was already down. This was my first chance to see the razorwire up close; the fence at the roadblock doesn’t have it, probably for PR reasons. It’s incredibly nasty stuff; try and get through barbed wire and it’ll mess you up, try and get through razorwire and it’ll probably kill you. See http://melbourne.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=24313&group=webcast for a close-up view.
Most of the crowd (probably about 800 people) had gone over the downed fence, but a hundred or so had hung back outside it. I stayed outside; I was there for political change, not a jailbreak (I want them as free Australians, not fugitives…and I had an appointment I didn’t want to miss shortly after the protest finished, so I wasn’t keen on getting arrested or having my head cracked, either), and I think that the only way we’ll really change things is by convincing the 15,000,000 voters out in suburbia who support this thing to change their minds. I was heavily tempted to cross the fence; partly peer pressure, partly a strong desire to see for myself the people inside. But pulling down fences is going to be reported on the news as a riot, whether it was or not, and that’s only going to polarise opinions away from the protestor’s cause, not towards it. It wasn’t what I’d gone there for; I was genuinely there for a peaceful protest.
Note, however, that I don’t think that knocking the fence over was morally wrong; I just think it was poor strategy from a PR point of view.
Now, I wasn’t at the fence when it came down, so I can’t give an eyewitness report of that, but from talking later on to people who were there: pulling down the fence was not premeditated. There was a group there who’d planned on knocking over a fence and then peacefully walking up to the inner fence so that they could talk to the refugees, but they’d planned to do that on the Saturday, not the Friday. According to what I heard (and what I believe; this is a compilation of what I heard from diverse sources) what happened at the fence was that the crowd got to it, a few people jumped up and grabbed hold of it, they noticed that it was fairly wobbly, they started pulling on it, a few more people jumped on it, and it came down. The support poles bent.[/quote]
