Rage and revolt on holy ground
The word on the street was that another protest was coming. So I went to bear witness.
“Where are you Avi Yemini?” I asked myself, standing at the top of Bourke Street at 10:30 in the morning. Nineteen hours before, a gang of “man-baby Nazi” protestors, supposedly a wicked mixture of disgruntled CFMEU members and anti-vax thugs, were doing bumps of coke in alleyways and forming human blockades on the West Gate. Fourteen hours after that, Melbourne was hit by an earthquake.
Now it’s 10:30 and I’m looking out onto the motionless city, tracing the tram tracks down the hill. Melbourne’s customary air of slow death pervades, although with a certain new sheen. Because the earthquake was the biggest in our recorded history, and because another protest is reportedly afoot, and because nothing has happened in Melbourne for almost a year and a half now, we are all put on edge. Where there is normally a pervasive sense of arrested decay, the city air this morning teems with a spirit of anticipation.
Everything has a strangeness to it. A distorted, non-stop whirr of helicopter rotors. Cars crawling behind a unit of police horses. An eerie stillness outside the Russell Street Police Headquarters, opposite the old gaol. I am gazing upon the building’s cream-brick façade when a Hilux pulls up by the old entrance. I stand back and observe. A driver and two passengers emerge, each sporting hi-vis vests. They greet another two figures waiting nearby. When I see the driver of the Hilux excuse himself and go pay for parking, I feel like I’m right on the edge of something.
Outside the CFMEU headquarters on Elizabeth Street, the outlet of protester rage two days prior, the police presence is so immense, the succession of riot shields so imperious, that I can’t help but think back to the Australia Day protest in January, or the BLM protest last June. Crowds at both events numbered in the tens of thousands, and garnered a facsimile of policing which was feeble if not practically non-existent. On Australia Day I saw a total of perhaps fifty cops, none of whom showed any interest in the plaintive masses before them. Now, in anticipation of a few hundred irate tradies, shielded, mounted, and holstered police are play-acting a role in an historical epic: the unbending forces of protection against the evil insurgents. All this bravura and show of force – for what?
By 11, it seems that a certain pattern is emerging, a pattern of order chafing against chaos. On one hand, we have the highly mechanised nature of the police guard, which, in the moment, seems so excessive that the intention can only really be to score aesthetic points. Yet the protestors, on the other hand, are disorganised and far-flung, like a Pollock painting. “Ralphy!” yells a lone protestor into his phone; “I’m on the corner of La Trobe and Russell.” He’s actually on the corner of La Trobe and Elizabeth.
Considering this chaos of movement, it’s somewhat surprising that the spotfires start popping up when they do. At 11:30, I’m on La Trobe. I see a fracas in the distance, then hear a series of hollow pops bouncing down the hill. A small group of protesters flee along Russell Street. For the next half-hour, I’m hearing the occasional yell, a pop, an echo. I’m running, I’m chasing these noises thinking they’ll lead me to the crowds. Most of all, I’m chasing Avi Yemini, because I know that if I find him, I’ll have found the action. I head south-west.
“Can you hear them chanting?” a Channel Nine reporter asks her cameraman. They’re sitting on the steps outside BHP House on William Street. I’m walking past as she asks this, but have noticed no sounds myself. Only upon catching her question do I look up to see a stream of hi-vis vests and black hoodies and Steel Blues. The block is suddenly reverberating with a new vitality, and I’m drawn into the fray. The Channel Nine duo do not move.
Reports from the two days prior had drawn their own picture: workers, anti-vaxxers, lockdown opposers, deplorables. An innocent if somewhat charged group of tradies, infiltrated by professional protesters out for trouble. To some extent, the depiction cohered with my experience – all the aforementioned were there, all were playing their role. Not mentioned, however, were the friends, the colleagues, the people joking around with each other, the people just hanging out. The people lighting spliffs or sharing ten-packs of Jim Beam.
Nor did I see, in the press résumés, any mention of photographers and media, who constituted a non-negligible proportion of the crowd, and who organically formed a kind of unmandated cordon around the group. These were largely freelancers, all looking for the killer shot, the killer grab. Besides them, it was a cabal of sideshow faces. While corporate media reporters decided to stay seated on the steps of BHP House, alternative media proliferated: the photographers amateur and pro, the live-streamers holding iPhone cage-rigs, the anti-establishment figures, the Real Rukshans – those who, apparently, are “part of the problem.”
That so many “journalists” were on the ground covering this story seemed to dissolve certain boundaries I’d erected regarding what it meant to be a journalist. Where I’d expected to retain a certain outsider status, an identity from which I’d be able to bring a cool-eyed, unapologetic vision of the proceedings, I found instead that I was one of numerous, non-specific minds who had smelled action and merely followed their nose. Indeed, so plentiful was the alternative media presence that I was forced to pause and reconsider what I was even doing there. What was I trying to capture? How was I going to slant it all? What was my angle? But the crowd was less forgiving: you either paid close attention or got left behind. I kept my reservations in check and followed along.
There was a young photographer who sidled up to me at the crowd’s rear and gestured to my camera. We had a brief exchange and then he moved away. And for the next hour or so I kept spotting him rushing frantically around. I felt like telling him to calm down, to let it all come, because sometimes all you have to do is be there. Case in point: I was idling off to the side of the road, taking in the crowd, when a guy wearing a black “MAKE NZ CRATE AGAIN” cap came over and chatted to me. He saw my camera and my notepad and asked me who I was with. I told him I’m independent, which, in this case, constituted both a real truth and a convenient one. I then asked him where we were headed. “I dunno, mate,” he exclaimed. “Just follow the crowd, mate.” Won over by his exuberant pragmatism, I asked why he was here. “It’s about what’s right and what’s wrong,” he responded, without second thought. “It’s a choice, mate.”
Having circumvented the police line on Victoria and Elizabeth Streets, taking the long way around through the Haymarket Roundabout and up Pelham Street, we reached Swanston. The chants were expanding in both register and reach. What started with simple affirmations of “every day!” soon adopted a more aggressive if slightly banal tone. “Fuck Dan Andrews!” one went, a chant so easy and incidental and catchy that I almost joined in. “Freedom! Freedom!” went another. When the riff from Seven Nation Army came out, I felt like I was at a Melbourne Victory game.
And yet, there was a kind of diffuseness here which is unthinkable at a sporting event. Or, more precisely, it felt as though the Victory was already down three goals, the game more or less over, and that the crowd persisted in banging on just to get their money’s worth. Or maybe this was a tactic to throw the doubters off the scent. Because, as we all streamed past Flinders Street, it certainly looked like something momentous was happening. Whether the feeling was real, or whether it was a gigantic hollow sphere, an empty stage gilded in gold, I wasn’t sure.
It was at this point that I saw Avi Yemini, and thought to myself: either leave now, or bear witness, because you’re right there.
There had been signs, intermittent ones it must be said, that the equanimity of the protest would not be able to withstand certain provocations which were so obviously heading its way. Signs that a fracture was coming, one which would snap the line to which both sides held firm. Earlier in the day, as we stared at the police barricade outside the Queen Vic Market before heading down Cobden Street, a guy dressed head-to-toe in black picked up a plank by the side of the road and began waving it around aggressively. “Woah,” his comrades said, trying to get him to drop it. “Woah… peace.”
Later, on Swanston Street, an older man, around 70 or so, decided to give a derisive note to an eshay who was passing by and staring him down. I didn’t catch what the old man said, but the eshay snapped. “You what? I’m fuckin’ 17, cunt, let’s go,” he said, bumping the old man in the chest. The eshay’s friends separated them, ushering the old man away.
These were the things the protest movement, so proudly touting its peaceful bona fides throughout the day, couldn’t afford people to see. “The mainstream media can’t say we’re violent,” one of the protesters would say later in the afternoon, everybody cheering and whooping at the irrefutability of the proclamation. “They can’t! We’re just out here for our rights.” But this itself was just another media narrative, no truer than any other. “We’re not scared of coppers!” others yelled, a phrase which I could only think signalled a total lack of ideas.
Lack of ideas indeed: we proceeded to head straight for the Shrine of Remembrance, almost as if whoever was leading the march had turned onto Swanston, seen the colonnade in the distance, and thought, sure, why not? Whether it was or wasn’t an appropriate destination, I didn’t care to decide, because a cyclone of voices was occupying me: “This is the ANZACs, isn’t it?” asked one, disembodied, the question hanging in the air like soiled laundry. Another voice was provided by Vivian Malo, a healthcare worker and activist who had materialised beside Kings Domain, donning a flower-patterned shirt and a grey beanie. “Get the fuck off the road,” she yelled into the crowd. Several protesters jibed back. “Oi just leave her,” one of them said to his mates; “she adds to the numbers. Haw haw haw.”
The back-and-forth continued as we drove forward, the Shrine’s gleaming silver Cenotaph coming into view as we proceeded up the approach. Then Malo absconded into the Bhutan Cypress trees; the crowd continued on. I reached the top of the steps leading on to the monumental forecourt. I noticed an inscription laid out beneath my feet, and stopped to read it: “LET ALL MEN KNOW THAT THIS IS HOLY GROUND.”
I soon noticed, with a bewildering degree of force, the undeniably co-opted quality of the proceedings. This realisation was ushered in by the appearance of certain appropriated images, appropriated phrases, which made it all seem debased and somewhat lame. At the boundary of the northern police line, protesters had started to kneel in supplication before their enemy, a Flower Power throwback. They spoke in soft tones, begged for a peaceful resolution, prayed for the officers in front of them. Thirty minutes later, when the kneelers had headed back to the tribe, the police line advanced on all sides.
Much of the appropriation was channelled into the megaphone, which seemed to be the protest movement’s spirit stick – all who were handed it became petrified by a fear of disappointing. Thus were born a further series of honed-in banalisms. “If we separate, they’ll pick us off!” one guy spouted lackadaisically. “Our bodies, our rights,” sang another. Out in front of the group, a face rather familiar to me was speaking sternly into an iPhone camera. With his arm raised in salute to the colonnaded structure behind him, his live invective was punctuated thus: “Welcome to our shrine, Daniel.” I suddenly recognised him. Damien Richardson is his name, an actor who I used to watch on City Homicide. He’d aged a lot since then.
But after all, protest is the recourse of the disenfranchised, those wholly deprived of agency and unable to conjure up any more reasoned answers. The same was true of the Black Lives Matter protesters who demonstrated in mid-2020: they had no more answers, and, faced with incalculable fury, could do nothing else but funnel it into an unmissable aesthetic display. Before me now was a conjugation of the same infinitive. It seemed irrefutable to me that this was not the so-called “man-baby Nazi” crowd that some increasingly irrelevant voices so desperately wanted to portray. This was an exhibition of what has come over a certain demographic of Australians who feel stuck on a sinking ship, and who have decided that mannered refutation achieves nothing. It was a succession of desperate screams in an empty void, a void wherein screaming is the only option left.
By now it was 2:30, and the event’s scope was finally dawning on me. Such was the profusion of protest imagery, of rage, of isolation and of enfeebling cultural discourses, that a kind of Frankenstein had been created. I was now in the grip of that Frankenstein, as we all were, and I felt its seams and knew it couldn’t hold. The police were determined to ensure so: strident lines of riot gear, as well as horse-mounted officers, had materialised on the north edge of the forecourt, and new rows were forming to the east. They were stepping ever closer to the crowd, who were by now almost totally confined to the balcony and small square in front of the monument.
When we’d first arrived at the Shrine, I’d seen Avi Yemini, the king of appropriated aesthetics, shaking hands with all-comers, smiling, awash in his celebrity. He appeared to me a kind of Robin Hood of the underground, stealing the spotlight from the rich and gifting it to the poor. He was a veil-piercer, an all-seeing eye, a mythological hero, and as the only meaningful counter-reaction against the tide of press lambasting the protesters, his popularity was assured. But when the police moved in, I looked around for him, and discovered, to my bewilderment, that he was nowhere to be found.
It was delicately poised. Row upon row upon row upon row of police – riot at the front and uniformed behind them, organised and tightly held – looked guardedly upon the haggling mess of a crowd before them. So co-ordinated was their creeping forward that I had an image of generals conniving somewhere in the distance, huddled in the barracks, holding maps and diagrams and compasses. I found myself off to the side of the action, caught on the precipice between the two forces. I tried to make conversation with one of the policemen closing in on us. “Why do you have to use horses?” I asked. “What do you think?” he retorted, blithe and fed up. “They’re bigger than us, aren’t they?” A female officer adjacent to him suddenly pointed towards my pants. I stood there, confused. She lowered her mask; she was lightly smiling. “Your fly is undone,” she said. I zipped up. “Thanks, Officer,” I said. “Here to serve,” she said.
I wasn’t the only one turning my attention outwards. The protesters were caught in an increasingly claustrophobic position, and were getting agitated and desperate. A silver-haired British guy, who at first struck me as lending an air of nobility to the proceedings, tore his mask off and started yelling. “You sixteen-pieces-of-silver pigs!” he said, incorrectly. Another protester, golden-haired and blue-eyed and occupying that interstitial space between a hippie and a carpenter, was strolling along the front of the police line. “NOT HERE FOR VIOLENCE – I’M HERE FOR CHOICE” read the sign he held aloft. I caught him in the middle of a sentimental oration: “… I prayed for you this morning,” he said to the affectless riot police. “Each and every one of you. I prayed for your safety.”
Nor were the media, who had remained at a safe distance and were looking on from behind the police line, spared the desperate ire of the protesters. Even the beloved Avi Yemini was feeling the pinch. A bearded protester in a dark shirt had begun yelling accusations of treason his way: “You’re on their side!” he called, and, in the literal sense, he was right. Yemini was behind the police lines. He had to stand on a concrete block just to see his accuser. “Okay, mate,” Yemini said back, his microphone held by his side. But the beard was on a roll. “Who are you with?” he asked, questioning why Yemini, the purported man of the people, the populist hero broadcasting the real thoughts and real feelings of real Australians, wasn’t fighting the fight with his brethren. Why, in other words, he refused to lend some skin to the game. Yemini simply turned away. The police took another step forward.
At or around this point, a certain Vivian Malo re-appeared. Her earlier cameo had been a mere precursor; now, with the protesters boxed in and her position firmly established behind the police cordon, her real tour de force could begin. “You selfish pricks, how dare you!” she said. This provoked an argument with a nearby protest sympathiser off to the side of the Shrine, who vaguely questioned her allegiances. As in, why was she, a Gooniyandi woman with a known history of civil rights activism, siding with the police? “There are only two types,” she responded: “dumb cunts, and paid cunts.” This was a lighter moment in what was, in the majority, a rhapsody of vitriol. And while her unrestrained use of the words “cunt” and “fuck” certainly endeared her to me, no mention of this was made in the Age article which ran the next day, an article specifically about Malo which described her as “vilified.” According to the piece, the most forceful rhetoric Malo employed was calling one of the protesters a “loser.” Later she’s quoted as saying: “It’s the confusion and hypocrisy that really gets to me. Be congruent. If you’ve got a real argument, put it forward.”
And she’s not wrong. In fact, much of her case against the protesters – the selective choice of causes worthy of protest, the many sacrificed for the few – seemed altogether reasonable to me. But the incongruency, to adopt a parlance, is unmissable. All Age staff, besides the photographers, had decided to remain far behind the police lines; I saw one very senior reporter briefly chatting to two or three onlookers, before turning to go, evidently satisfied. Of course, when media choose to remain wilful on-lookers to expressions of inconvenient grief, this is the result: Vivian Malo is the paragon of reason, a victim of protester frustration, and her lowly counterparts are “disgusting.”
But the superficiality of the Malo narrative was not to rear its head until much later; for now, I remained steadfast amidst the enclosing lines on the north and east sides. I moved to the front of the crowd, where negotiations for an exit strategy had begun. Damien Richardson was demanding, as unofficial attorney for the plaintiffs, that the police to the north move aside, so that the protesters may leave the way they came. Superintendent Brett Hinton, a rather gaunt-looking officer whose ill-fitting armour gave him an air of unfussy distinction, maintained that the officers to the west would displace, and that the protesters were “free to go” that way. When he presented Hinton’s ultimatum to the erratic crowd, Richardson, like myself, must have realised that there was going to be no easy, obliging way to end the protest. It was approaching 4pm. We had been standing exposed in the sun for three hours at this point, and the soft back-and-forth of it all had slowly percolated our emotion. Now, the crowd was tired, burnt, and hungry. They wanted what they wanted.
The thread wasn’t slackening; instead it was staying taut, and all sides were holding the blade to it. I saw a protester, wearing a hi-vis and Steel Blues, down the last of his James Squire, crush the can into a coin, and tuck it away into his pocket. Into frame drifted a man dressed entirely in black, who was holding an A4 paper sign aloft: “JESUS IS COMING SOON! THE END IS NEAR!” A man wearing a suit had materialised at the front of the Shrine steps, where the majority of the crowd was gathered. Pinned onto his lapel was a streak of army medals. He had been given the megaphone. “Please respect the Shrine” went his clarion call, which provoked an uproar of enthusiastic agreement and applause from the crowd. At that moment, I stepped up behind the throng and saw two thick-built guys in bucket hats, one of whom was lighting up a spliff.
And I understood them, their desire to heighten and exaggerate the experience, to milk it for all it was worth. I myself was intoxicated. The aroma of the weed, the unrepentant sun, the police line inching forward, the crackle of the megaphone, the whirr of the helicopter rotors, the nonplussed officers, the splenetic masses, the thirst, the hunger, the masks. I knew in this moment that it was real, that it had been real all along. I was somewhere vertiginous, caught on the edge of a piercing truth. Then, right in front of me, the police line took a step forward. From over my shoulder flew a water bottle, straight towards the riot squad. They took another step forward. A can was thrown. Hands drew to pockets. Another can was thrown. The police took another step forward.
And then, all of a sudden, the centre no longer holds. A litany of cans, bottles, and other paraphernalia rain down upon police. The first rubber bullets in five and a half hours are fired directly into the fleeing crowd. Stun grenades are thrown and loud explosives deployed to shock the resistance out of the protestors. I try and keep my head up to take a few more photos, but I’m swallowed up by the crowd and the noise, and I zag off to the west end of the shrine, where the riot police are out of sight. I head down the hill and, when at a safe distance, turn. A ruler-straight row of riot police are lined at the top of the western steps, still firing into the crowd which has dispersed and collapsed like an empty dress. Then, a silence falls over everything.
I am soon confronted by the advancing line of uniformed police, who are clearing all the detritus of the protest. “Go now,” they cry forcefully, directing me to the St Kilda Road footpath where I locate the nearest convenience store and buy the biggest bottle of water I can find. I then begin walking along St Kilda Road, back towards the city.
And off in the distance, I see a familiar figure. It’s Avi Yemini. He’s walking at quite the pace, his videographer trailing beside him. Avi seems spirited. And so he should be – after all, he got what he came for.