| |
|
Here is my account of what happened at Woomera, Australia, over the
Easter Weekend. It seems small in the context of the new attacks on
Palestine, but for us who were there I think it was very significant,
and 'large'. You can probably check Indymedia for all of this
information, but I decided to write my own account of it -- partly
because I simply want to remember it all, and partly because the
lessons that I learned might be useful for someone else to read.
Check out www.woomera2002.com or melbourne. indymedia for more
accounts of what happened from other people...
***
We got to Woomera on a drizzly Thursday morning, cold wind rushing
off the desert. The set-up crew consisted of about 30 people, most of
whom had driven through the night from Sydney and Melbourne to make
it in time. We'd already heard from the Woomera Area Administrator --
a kind of sheriff, I guess -- who offered a football oval 2
kilometres away from the Detention Centre gates to camp at, with
fresh water and portaloos. Two people had gone to meet him and scout
campsites earlier. This was the beginning of a 24-hour negotiating
and waiting game, reported on in this article I wrote for Indymedia
on Friday:
"We're sitting around a card table in this dust-bowl of a campsite,
drinking coffee and eating muesli. It's just like ordinary camping,
except there aren't any tents (Australian Protective Services have
forbidden us to 'erect camping structures' as part of their mission
to make us leave, on pain of arrest) and no sane holiday-maker would
ever want to camp here. The wind sweeps another cloud of dust into
your eyes a fast as you take a second to wipe them clean; if you sit
down for more than five minutes, you get tiny patterns of red
sediment in the creases of your pants.
But we're here, and we're staying. The camp has now been held for
twenty-four hours. This morning we're waiting for the big convoy of
buses to arrive so we can put down tents with the strength of added
numbers. Last night, after the APS failed at their bust-in, people
parked their cars in a 'wagon circle' to protect everyone through the
night. We know that APS reinforcements have arrived in Woomera and
that they'll be in to 'move us on' at some point; the only question
is when. The general feeling in camp is that we can win, whatever
they do; having already de-arrested three people, we can de-arrest
more if necessary.
You could argue that holding this particular camp-site is not the
thing we're here to do; that we're here to talk, to act, maybe to
walk onto the Prohibited Area on Saturday and fly flags and let off
fireworks to let the detainees know we're here. But from the moment
you get here, you're involved in direct action. Claiming space is
what it's all about. We're in Woomera because a defence force
employee, the Woomera Area Manager, can issue an order for our
eviction from degraded, unused land. We're here because the state
controls this land, rightfully the country of the Kokatha people, and
the state isn't using the land right.
As I write this, two buses from Melbourne are arriving. Ridiculously
clean people are climbing off them and tying scarves across their
faces. Soon enough they'll be red-faced with dust, but for now it's
just nice to see clean, fresh faces come to join us. A new arrival
has just erected a tent on the edge of camp, and he's being told to
take it down so we can all put them up together, in solidarity.
Hopefully we'll also succeed in getting permanent medical, legal and
media tents set up at the same time. Camping has never been so
political.
***
A few Indymedia kids had gone to the Indymedia Secure Upload Location
(henceforth known as the ISUL!) as six busloads arrived from all
over. Imagine our surprise when we returned to find a fully-fledged
tent city, silver domes everywhere. The Spacekids and people from
Irene warehouse had erected a giant tarpaulin between our two vans.
We had some lunch and then trooped down to the police roadblock, 1 km
from the detention centre, to witness a 'noise and flag' action
inside. You could see small figures waving on the roof of a building
beyond the fence, so far away we couldn't read the text of the banner
they'd strung up. People made noise back, played drums, chanted, took
pictures and filmed, and then it was all over, about an hour after it
had begun.
I expected the action that evening to be similar. We were already all
arrestable, and it seemed that going onto the 'exclusion zone' would
simply make us more vulnerable. Besides, the group No-One Is Illegal
had scheduled a direct action on Saturday afternoon, a mass walk-on.
At around five, someone received a message from inside the centre
asking us to come at 6pm. A sound system was connected to a phone, so
we could receive messages from inside the centre on the phone they
had. By 6pm, they had already begun their own protest and had the
phone taken away by guards, I assume, because the phone link-up never
happened.
For some reason, the first people to start walking towards the centre
bypassed the roadblock and headed cross-country, making a beeline for
the fence closest to the place where detainees were protesting. I'll
never forget that moment, walking along in a giant column of people
waving flags and banners, all of us yelling things like 'Freedom!'
and whooping. The sound system was playing the 'Amelie' soundtrack,
so sad and yet majestic, important-sounding music. (it already had
significance for us who'd been there from, the start; 'Amelie' had
been our lullaby before APS raided the previous night.) We came to
the first fence, a 5-metre high fence with razorwire lining the top
of it, and milled around it. People ran up to climb it, and began to
shake it back and forth, bending the bars. Someone let off a flare
and orange smoke billowed into the sky. And then the fence started
coming down for real; every shove bent it away from us until finally
people were hopping over the wire, bringing sandbags to weight it
down, and a whole 30-metre section of fence was flattened. People ran
through. What else were we gonna do? There were hardly any cops,
something I could not believe, and in a slightly paranoid state I
waited for them to head us off somewhere, to burst from inside the
centre with riot gear. None did until much later.
I don't think my heart has ever felt so big or close to bursting.
Ironically, we found out two days later that we could have gotten to
the inner fence without bringing that fence down. But it didn't
matter, or it did; it was just the way things happened. Finally, I
ran in to join those who had begun to mill at the inner fence.
Detainees were on the fence, everywhere, at the bottom between two
gigantic inner palisade fences (both lined with razorwire) and on the
roof of the compound. Some were crying; many were yelling chants as
loudly as us. One man was preparing to climb right over the top of
the razorwire (I learnt later that he'd been passed wire-cutters and
snipped at the wire until his hands were bleeding so badly he
couldn't use them anymore). At one point, someone inside had produced
a metal bar; people were using it to lever the bars apart so they
could slip through. Everyone was crying, it seemed. I was standing
opposite a middle-aged man and a young boy, both of them talking
fast, telling us as much as they could about beatings, threats from
guards, thanking us for coming. One of them said, 'We knew the people
of Australia did not want us locked up here, we knew they cared about
us.' Some of them were throwing flowers to us. I couldn't talk much;
I said 'sorry' a lot of times and burst into tears and held someone's
hand through the bars and finally, when the police were coming,
untied the orange No-One Is Illegal bandanna I'd been given and
handed it to him.
By then people were running away in small clusters shielding escaped
detainees from the police, who were now coming in with batons.
Everyone ran back in the direction of the campsite; at one point I
had a small altercation with the Channel Ten camera crew who were
trying to film a detainee; I ran in front of the camera, holding my
hand up. We jostled a bit; he called me some names, tried to push me
away, and then told me indignantly, 'We give you a voice,' which was
so ridiculous I had to laugh. Police were now approaching from the
other side, trying to cut our access back to camp. Horses had come
out at the fence, driving away the last of those helping detainees
escape. To my shame, when the coppers came towards us I moved out of
the way (last time I was that close to a copper I got my head beaten
in, guess I'm still not entirely recovered) and although people
blocked the way with their bodies, one detainee at least was arrested
just then.
I don't think anyone realised the extent of the escape; I certainly
didn't. I thought maybe about ten or twelve had gotten out. It was
more like fifty. This was confirmed when I got back to camp and found
detainees, everywhere. I'm not gonna be detailed here (there are so
many stories people cannot tell, that no-one could tell even to
fellow protesters, for fear of incriminating others or ourselves) --
suffice to say that some detainees had a chance to sit, to talk, to
have their stories recorded (check out Melbourne Indymedia at
melbourne.indymedia.org -- I am proud to say that no mainstream media
outlet got interviews with freed detainees, but Indymedia did...).
No-one had known this was going to happen. The action was the most
spontaneous thing I've ever taken part in; no-one planned it. And
almost no-one had ever thought we'd ever have an escape situation to
deal with, so we were very unprepared. This is one of the things I
most regret about Woomera2002; we didn't plan enough, we didn't
believe in the power of action enough to think that possibility
through.
Then again, people simply dealt and did what they could. It was
getting dark and this made it far more difficult for the police to
check through every campsite. A group of socialists had blockaded a
tent with an Iranian woman inside; the stand-off lasted for hours,
until the police broke through the linked arms and found only a
white, youngish protester dressed in the burqa the Iranian woman had
left behind hours before. Money, food, water, maps, warm clothing and
other supplies were passed onto those detainees who wanted to chance
walking out through the desert. The police had set up roadblocks
immediately, and at one point that night a whole heap of people tried
to bust through the roadblock in cars and on foot. (They were
arrested, both detainees and our protesters.) At around 10pm, I left
with A., an Indymedia kid, to do uploads at the ISUL. We somehow got
someone to drive us out; at the roadblock they made me answer
questions about my job, why I have such a weird name, where I live,
how much income I earn per annum. In the car, S. and A. joked that
the (female) cop was trying to pick me up, she kept me there for so
long.
At the ISUL, we wrote, chain-smoked, talked, uploaded reports and
checked different newswires for what the mainstream media were
producing, how the SA government were responding and so on. Every so
often I'd ring someone back at camp for a progress check; we fully
expected the cops to bust through, and rumours of lines of horses and
riot police were running rife. Finally at about 1.30am he said that
people were going to sleep, that it seemed quieter. There were
millions of questions I wanted to ask but couldn't. Neither A. nor I
slept well that night; it seemed callous to walk out on such a tense
and needful situation. We were also reading accounts of continuing
rioting inside the detention centre, perhaps a tactic to prevent ACM
guards from doing a head count and working out just how many people
had escaped. Later we found out that ACM had dosed their food with
sleeping pills to stop them rioting. I wanted to go back to camp and
even considered walking, but it seemed safer to just to brush my
teeth and try to sleep in the bed we'd managed to furnish the ISUL
with. The bitch was that we didn't have any food; no breakfast in the
morning or, as it happened, until 4pm when we finaly got back to
camp. I went to sleep wondering how the 'visitors' I'd met would
leave, hoping they were safe and that someone back at camp was
helping them.
I think I'll end it there; lots more happened, of course, but there's
dinner cooking and I think I've written as much as I can at one
sitting. The one thing I want to say is that this protest renewed my
hope, a giant hope, a hope that dares to help free people literally,
not just symbolically. We've been shafted in the mainstream media as
a violent rent-a-crowd (how original). People like the Woomera
lawyers, who represent many of the detainees incarcerated at Woomera,
have told us we did the detainees a huge disservice by colluding in
their escape; in fact, one lawyer at least believes that the
protesters inside the razorwire did not have an informed choice about
escaping, that if they'd known the penalties they wouldn't have done
it. (She said, and I quote, "No-one knew what was happening. People
inside thought there was a revolution going on out there!" Yes,
Virginia, many revolutions were going on outside. And inside.
Millions of them.)
I don't believe that, and moreover I don't believe it was us who
initiated that action. We just helped in whatever way we could; we
acted in solidarity. I believe in diversity of tactics and respect
the hard work that many lawyers and immigration agents do to get
detainees through the system; but when the system itself is fucked,
working outside of that system seems like the only rational response.
The other thing I want to say is that borders are real. I don't think
you can really understand such a border until you're face to face
with it, touching the bars, holding the hand of someone inside and
wondering how it's possible that they ended up inside the fence and
you didn't. I'm not usually a person who comes out with 'shoulds' but
I reckon everyone should go to a border camp. This is a global issue.
PS Some light relief -- Orange is the colour of the group 'No-one is
Illegal'; it seemed kinda appropriate. Anyhow, this reminds me of an
exchange between two anarchists I heard this weekend: 'So, is it true
that orange is the new black?' 'Yep, totally.' 'Fuck, I'd better go
buy an orange hoodie, eh.' |
|
|
