(c) Melina Magdalena 2008
BACKGROUND TO AIDEX 1989
There seems to be little recorded memory of AIDEX 1989, which was the precursor to the BIG protest in Canberra at AIDEX 1991. I was one of a small group of Adelaide activists who travelled from the Anti-Bases Campaign action at Nurrungar in 1989 to Canberra, to protest against the Australian promotion of an international trade fair of weapons and “defence” equipment.
The training we peace activists had previously received in Non-Violent Direct Action had prepared us to be clear-headed and thoughtful about how we would engage authorities (police, security guards, army) and what our purpose was, in standing up for what we believed in. This was mainly through our involvement in the Anti-Bases Campaign protest actions at Nurrungar. Yet even the History of the Anti-Bases Campaign Coalition fails to count AIDEX 1989 as one protest in which Anti-Bases Coalition activists were present and active.
We were fairly clear about what we believed in. Animal Liberation provides some good information about what NVDA was for us. We were ratbags, but we were non-violent ratbags. We wanted to be seen and heard and taken seriously, but we also wanted to be safe and have fun. We were creative and we took calculated risks. The idea of non-cooperation was as appealing as street theatre, and during our participation in the action at Nurrungar, our contact with police officers had been friendly and non-threatening.
I Was Only Nineteen, knew nobody who was directly involved in making war, and had every intention of keeping my nose clean. I would no sooner have considered applying for a defence force scholarship than applying to NASA’s Space Shuttle Program. A few years later when Richard, who had entertained all the protesters and the security guards alike with his hilarity and sharp wit, was knocked back from the Army Reserves, I imagined he had some kind of death wish. Come to think of it, one of my old school friends, Sheila who came along to AIDEX with us in 1989 for a holiday more than out of any conviction, ended up joining one of the branches of the ADF.
Now that I am older and have had contact with a more interesting and broader range of people, I know people whose lives have become entangled with warmongering, whether because there are too few peaceful outlets for their specialities, or because they needed a trade and the defence forces were the only creditable establishments who would take them on. But at that time we were purists. Life was black and white. It was quite simple. Us and them.
As Chris Hannaford writes: “it is our job to be the peace movement and set examples to the police and the community. In this way we can influence public opinion.”
(Accessed online 23/8/08)
We were mighty proud of ourselves for making it to Canberra on such short notice. When we arrived back in Adelaide after Nurrungar, dusty red and triumphant, Roman Orzsanski of Friends Of the Earth interviewed a few of us youngsters about our experience on Triple M Radio (Adelaide’s community radio station that has since morphed into Three D Radio). It was Roman who told us about AIDEX 1989, and it was Roman who inspired us to hire a bus and try to fill it with protesters to stop this trade in war.
I worked my tail off trying to convince people to come, but in the end the $2000 deposit I had put down on a coach was squandered, and my trip back to Europe was to become a never-realised dream. The bus was less than half full, and most of those who went were students or concession holders. Oh well, I was pregnant anyway. Life was taking a serious turn for the worse, what with the Hawke government promoting Australia as a venue of choice for war games and weapon exhibitions.
I was ashamed to live in Adelaide then, as I am now – Don Dunstan would surely turn in his grave to think that we have transformed from The Festival State to the Defence State.
Jones, Pestorius and Law of The Australian Nonviolence Network(accessed 22/8/08), write in relation to NVDA protest in Australia from the mid 1980s that: “There was bitter criticism at having to buy the whole non-violent package as well as the concept, particularly by those who were driven by a deep anger directed against the state and all its institutions”.
AIDEX 1989 - THE ACTION!
When I think back on our action at the Canberra Show Grounds in 1989 it is obvious that we were acting from our heartfelt belief in NVDA.
Our small group of activists was not involved in the Australian Nonviolence Network or the Nomadic Action Group. Though some of us had been involved for a while in activism, mostly through C.A.N.E., SANITY and the Anti-Bases Campaign, we were really just driven by our idealism which told us that we could make a difference just by being present and making a peaceful stand against the military industrial complex as we understood it.
We were not interested in attacking anyone. We were not interested in being attacked. The fact that we chose an arrestable action was influenced by our recent contact with the Catholic Worker movement and the Jesus Christians, though we were not representatives of either of these groups. We neither destroyed property, nor abused anyone verbally.
It didn’t take much for us to work out what kind of stunt we would pull at AIDEX. And it was a stunt. Our purpose was not to confront those whose jobs it was, to keep ratbags like us, out of the arms fair. Our job was to (a) draw attention to AIDEX in order to show the world that not every Australian supported this venture and (b) express our opposition and outrage about AIDEX.
The entrance to AIDEX was through the Canberra Show Grounds front gates. We got a ladder, climbed on top of the ticket booth, and pulled the ladder up behind us to prevent anyone using it to remove us from our chosen place of protest. We took with us, snacks, water to drink, fake blood, a megaphone and a banner. Once in place, my husband-to-be proceeded to blare out his Dylan-influenced poem through the megaphone. The rest of us unfurled the banner down from the roof and hurled our blood across it.
I can’t find a record of this protest online, but I know we made the Canberra Times the next morning. We ignored police demands to come down. We ignored police indignation that we would not comply, and give them the ladder. The police eventually found another ladder they could use to carry us off the roof. Fearing that we might fall, we did cooperate in our inevitable arrest. We spent the night in the lockup, and appeared in the Magistrate’s Court the next morning.
The men spent the night in the company of Bernie Maloney, who subsequently became a good friend. We women spent the night in the company of a young mother who had been arrested for outstanding fines and was frantic about the welfare of her little girl.
We were charged next morning with Breach of the Peace, which we all found hysterically ironic, and we were released on the condition that we not protest at AIDEX again. Since our bus was due to depart, this was an easy condition to fulfil, at least until 1991.
AIDEX 1991 - DEBACLE AND ANARCHY
My second child was born in mid-October 1991, and so both of my children are veterans of that protest. In hindsight I was utterly mad to have believed I could effectively protest outside the gates of AIDEX 1991 with a toddler of 18 months and a 6 week old baby, but I desperately wanted to be part of the groundswell of indignation and outrage that the Australian Government could be so short-sighted and stupid, in encouraging this trade in war machinery. I reasoned if I had been part of the first protest, I had every right to be part of the second. And I didn’t want my children to grow up in a world where war was waged in the name of keeping the economy productive!
The same group in Canberra organised the protest this time, but it was a very different picture. Activists from all over Australia swarmed to the site. There seemed to be no central organisation. It was loud, uncomfortable and chaotic. This was not really what we’d signed up for, and was in direct contrast to the protest of 1989.
Most of the protesters were in discomfort and distress of one kind or another, whether from lack of space to rest and recuperate before another shift of blockading the exhibition, or from lack of access to necessary amenities. The heady sense of anarchic excitement warped into fear as meetings were called that people either ignored or disrupted. Decision-making was not a successful part of the process, which proceeded ad hoc. There were quite a few casualties, including Non Violent Direct Action.
We were at least part of an organised group that fed us, and we had a tent. I distinctly remember throwing one of very few wifely tantrums when my husband absconded, leaving me to erect the tent single-handedly and without anywhere safe or comfortable to set the babies down. The whole protest contingent had by that time become so jaded that not one person from our group bothered to assist me in my small distress. My voice was very small amongst the clamour. I think some other women nearby held the babies for me for a few minutes.
FEMINISM AT AIDEX 1991
My experience at AIDEX 1991 gave me the needed impetus to become a feminist. I would probably have said I was a feminist prior to that protest; it would have seemed liked the right thing to do, but I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why. I was deeply resentful at the lack of support my large group of peace protesters gave me, as a young mother. I felt entitled to be there and had travelled there with some crazy notion that others would enable me to participate. This did not eventuate. It wasn’t until years later that I realised some of what the others had been going through at the protest.
I was unprepared for camping with two babies. We weren’t prepared for the prickles that assaulted my son’s tender feet all about the campground. At 18 months, he had wandered barefoot through the world to this point. One golden moment of altruism at AIDEX 1991 was when Kirsty and Matilda in an extraordinary act of compassion on their meagre AUSTUDY funds, found their way into town and bought him a pair of multicoloured sandals, size 5. This made the experience a little more bearable for both of us.
Hellen Cooke of W.I.L.P.F. writes that she persuaded WILPF women to protest in Canberra’s Civic Centre instead of outside the gates of AIDEX, “because there were enough people there” (accessed 23/8/08). She goes on to describe what led her to be involved in a project to collect the stories of people who had been involved in AIDEX 1991.
“After AIDEX 1991, as after AIDEX 1989, people in Canberra seemed to be in a state of shock. Even people who had not been involved in the protest at all. Almost everybody who lived in Canberra knew somebody, or was related to somebody who had been in the protest, it was so widespread and well attended.“
My perspective during the protest itself was that it just seemed like more of the same. Our meetings leading up to going to Canberra had devolved into ugly obstructionist times where certain pig-headed men refused to allow the women any respect and blocked every attempt to seriously plan, learn, listen or seek consensus amongst ourselves. So when we became of the huge amorphous mob in Canberra any vestige of the voice of commitment, justice and integrity escaped from our lungs with a dying gasp. There was no energy and no goodwill left to try for NVDA, particularly when we were surrounded by the howls of unorganised protesters who seemed to be operating under very different agendas.
The truth was, our little peace group was already in shambles. We had been struggling to get it together for quite a while before going to AIDEX. The division between those activists (mostly women) who were strongly committed to NVDA and group processes were continually shouted down by the angry men who seemed to feel they were entitled to run the show because God had bestowed them with penises and deep voices. They effectively destroyed the bonds that had already grown between some of the women of the group, and the shy tendrils of sisterhood that occasionally crept out between the women who remained in the group withdrew in surprised hurt as soon as one of the men noticed them and reached out indiscriminately with his crude secateurs.
AFTERSHOCKS AND REFLECTIONS
Adelaide is a small city. I am kind of disinclined to get involved in so-called peace groups again. Try as I might to avoid the ghosts of my past, I’ve already heard disparaging remarks about people who want to sing at the protest
against APDSE. I’ve heard a member of the Anti-Bases Campaign express his strong view that it was lack of cohesive leadership that was responsible for the violence and injuries at AIDEX 1991. He believes that if there had been a stronger commitment to NVDA, and if protesters had been encouraged to adopt those principles at the protest, there would have been much less violence.
I’m not sure what to think about all that. It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, getting back in touch with the experiences of AIDEX 1989 and 1991. A great deal of shame has resurfaced and needed to be dealt with. My capacity to dredge up memories from those times that I thought I had firmly discarded has surprised me, and I’ve reached some new conclusions.
The only writing I did about my experiences at AIDEX 1989 and 1991 was in relation to how my attitude towards police changed from believing police were the enemy, as they were at these protests, to believing they might be able to assist women as we emerged from situations of domestic abuse and sexual violence.
It’s hard to believe that my children are now aged almost 17 and 18. They are now walking the footsteps of life’s journey that are parallel to those that I was on during my life as a ratbag activist from 1986-1993. As my daughter anticipates participating in the November 2008 protest action against **APDSE, I feel a mix of emotions – pride in her intelligence, liveliness, curiosity and idealism, bitterness about how short were my days in the sun, fear that she may find herself hurt or betrayed through her involvement in this protest, and jealousy that because I am now a staid fulltime worker I will probably be unable to participate in the protests myself, this time around.
I’ve been wondering whether to compare the protest at AIDEX 1991 with a war situation. Working as I do, with survivors of real war, I find the leap between my experience at AIDEX and the experiences they do not talk about, hard to make. But without being insensitive, my thoughts are wandering in that direction. Perhaps AIDEX 1991 is as close to being in a war as I have come during this lifetime?
The chaos and disorganisation that emerged as we protesters lost the veneer of living under the laws of our nation could be viewed as having taught us firsthand the absurdity of believing in human goodness and mutuality. This indeed comes very close to the accounts of wartime panic and institutionalisation that I have watched in films, read about, and heard survivors talk about. Niceness and compassion go out the window and it takes more time than we had to AIDEX to build up a sense of community welfare.
There was almost no altruism, no heroism and no self-sacrifice at AIDEX 1991. There was very little cooperation, and only isolated incidents of working together. I remember those who tried to change the world by meditating on the road outside the blockade, and I remember how they were taunted by their fellow protesters.
My personal experience as a young mother taught me that in this kind of situation it is each man for himself and damn anyone else. It was a sobering experience of lawlessness. A woman with children who had no attentive and benevolent patriarch looking out for her welfare could, but live in hope that her children would survive and she wouldn’t be trampled too badly. I felt vulnerable and unsheltered.
Police brutality at AIDEX 1991 came as a rude shock to peace activists, but there are clear lines of causality between the attitudes of protesters and the actions of the police. It was very scary to come into contact with that.
I suppose it is just as well that I did not find a way to take my babies and be part of the blockades. Instead, I wandered the median strips, admired the tripods and the daring of those who ascended into them, did a little fence weaving, and tried a few times to make eye contact with the feral mums who looked askance at me with my babies in nappies. Their babies went about with bare bottoms, and in the hierarchy of crunch, they won, hands down. They were so cool, with their hippy clothes, dreadlocks and bare feet. I was glad they had come out of the forests into the suburbs again, but we seemed like a separate species. Their experiences of protesting in the forests undoubtedly coloured their approach to protesting against AIDEX. Perhaps their experiences with the foresters and the police who allowed them to get on with their destructive work made them less surprised than some of us others, at the actions of the police.
I think it’s the bus trip home that I recall most vividly. Out coach broke down three times. My fellow protesters were mostly silent in shock; immersed in a state of dispirited disbelief at the inescapable fact that our world was nasty. Being at AIDEX 1991 propelled us out of our white middle class complacency and gave us just a tiny taste of the kinds of things that happen to bystanders and protesters in other parts of the world.
It was cherry season. We stopped to buy cherries from a roadside stall. I sat, longing for home and a soft mattress, while I breastfed my daughter and pipped cherries for my little son, to plug his mouth and keep his innocent chatter from interrupting the thoughts of those around him. They had enough on their minds.
*AIDEX = Australian International Defence Equipment eXhibition, Canberra Show Grounds, 1989 and 1991.
**APDSE = Asia Pacific Defence and Security Exhibition, Adelaide Convention Centre, November 2008.
