Book Review

When detainees in the Woomera Detention Centre sewed their lips together to protest incarceration conditions for illegal refugees, their self-mutilation drew shocked international attention – and it increased both domestic and foreign political pressure on the Howard government. As desperate as the detainees’ actions appears, however, it merely represents a continuum of escalating, staged political and social protests aimed at securing media attention and ultimately governmental or corporate action.	1
In this book’s subtitle, Sean Scalmer, a research fellow in politics at Macquarie University, depicts protests as examples of gimmickry. However, the word ‘gimmick’ sounds too frivolous for some of the sophisticated techniques protesters have used on issues ranging from the rights of Aboriginal peoples and women to nuclear disarmament to electoral politics of the Left and Right. True, there is an element of playfulness found in some types of protest activity – tossing phony money around the stock market, for example – and even in some issues, such as the University of Melbourne’s tongue-in-cheek Exam Resisters’ Movement, complete with a manifesto that threatened student boycotts to ensure abolition of exams. His extended metaphor of protests as theatre is more precise. Certainly traffic blockages, invasions of politicians’ homes, throwing of paint and animal blood, disruption of sporting events and establishment of an Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawn of Parliament House are forms of theatre, but theatre performed on public and quasi-public stages.	2
The book opens with what Scalmer labels ‘a mythical prehistory’ – an account of Czech pacifist Egon Erwin Kisch’s now-legendary leap from the ship Strathaird onto the pier in Melbourne after the attorney general refused to let him attend the 1934 Congress Against War and Fascism. It ends in 2000 with the S11 protests in Melbourne and the reconciliation marches around Australia.	3
But those events are just what statisticians call outliers. The true bookends are the Vietnam War protests that started in the mid-1960s and the protests for and against Pauline Hansen’s One Nation party in the late 1990s. Mythology now surrounds that first bookend, misremembering history in the process: we are told that the Vietnam War Moratorium has been idealized into something ‘significantly more controversial, disruptive and challenging than contemporary nostalgia’. As for the opposite bookend, an ‘obsession with free speech on the part of One Nation and the mainstream media became the object of parody and ironic inversion’ with the invented character Pauline Pantsdown, who made a satirical hit song and film clip and campaigned, although unsuccessfully, for the NSW Senate.	4
During the intervening decades, Australians imported some gimmicks – draft-card burning and freedom rides among them – from America and translated or converted them into Australian phenomena. But they also designed some of their own, with the press sometimes applauding, sometimes booing but always seeking novelty. Just as theatre always searches for something new rather than merely restaging the classics, so too does the theatre of protest search for novel tactics. Before the sewing of lips, some of the most recent innovations came from One Nation activists who fashioned the Internet into a cyber-weapon for mobilizing troops, undermining and embarrassing critics, spreading the party’s message, bolstering supportive radio talkback hosts and cowing the press.	5
Scalmer asks the question ‘what can protesters do?’ now that the public accepts the ‘staging of demands’ as a regular aspect of democracy, as long as there is no violence. Although his book was written before refugees at Woomera sewed their lips together or set fires at the Curtin and Port Hedland detention centres, that is one answer. Minister for Immigration Philip Ruddock has said the practice ‘offends the sensitivities of Australians’ yet it is an escalation of the long-established concept of a hunger strike, as a Radio National presenter noted. If the timing had been different, the book could have discussed the impact of ‘gimmicks’ that jeopardize the lives, safety and health – not merely pose the prospect of imprisonment – of the protestors themselves. One thing that is missing is any examination of media coverage of and public reaction to the Sea of Hands, which moved across the nation before the book was published.	6
As with any kind of theatre, ironies abound. For example, Scalmer describes what might be called Lessons for the Left, taught amid the white male-dominated Vietnam demonstrations. During a 1970 Moratorium protest at Sydney University,	7
a woman, Kate Jennings, angrily annexed the role of speaker. Amid the hubbub of ‘Victory to the NLF’ and ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’, a new voice was heard: ‘Watch out! You may meet a real castrating female or you’ll say I’m a manhating bra-burning lesbian member of the castration penisenvy brigade, which I am. I would like to speak.
A day later, Paul Coe, an Aboriginal man, ‘shouldered his way to the microphone and demanded the right to speak’ to the 10,000 demonstrators in Hyde Park, Sydney. One attendee remembered:
He showed no generosity to the audience. His tone was brutal. You are our oppressors. You worry about Vietnam, about the Black struggle in the USA or South Africa. But what about us here? You raped our women, you stole our land, you massacred our ancestors, you destroyed our culture, and now – when we refused to die out as you expected – you want to kill us with your hypocrisy.
And in what might be called Lessons for the Right and Left from the Hanson era, activists on both sides learned the hard way how they can be undercut if they push too hard. On one side, the anti-Hanson forces ‘became increasingly less disruptive and more moderate in character’ after the pro-Hanson forces successfully framed their confrontational tactics as irrational, bullying, violent, intimidating and anti-free speech. Scalmer’s summary of critical-sounding press accounts of protests at the 1997 One Nation party meeting in Dandenong, Victoria, found five stories that used the negative term ‘ran the gauntlet’, for example. On the other side, the pro-Hanson side fell prey to parody and ridicule in the press.
Ironically, too, the mainstream media found itself a protest target in 1975. Amid the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s government, hundreds of protestors marched on the News Limited building to ‘take on the press … and contest the editorial bias of Murdoch family newspapers’. The disruption moved to the warehouse, where bundles of papers were seized from delivery trucks, a smoke bomb exploded, arrests occurred and union officials orated before the crowd went home. Yet the potential for ‘a new media-oriented protest’ that would challenge ‘the central role of the press and television in framing public debate’ died stillborn. Conservative editorial policies remained unchanged, and, in fact, the newspapers used their pages to attack the demonstrators as opponents of free speech.	8
There is an obvious symbiosis between protestors and press. While Scalmer’s focus is more on the protesters and how police and policymakers respond, one key to their effectiveness is how an event plays in the press. To measure that, in part, he tallies newspaper stories and tracks shifts in editorial responses to protest tactics. The book also illustrates, as One Nation rediscovered, that news-making can be an ‘object of intervention, news reporting the object of manipulation’.	8
But effectiveness is also in the mind of the beholder. Think about this dilemma facing activists: ‘While the size of political demonstrations is a good general guide to the likelihood of media coverage, it is no guarantee of sensitive news reporting or incipient political victory’. And if asked, some protesters would candidly reply that disruption and attention are acceptable substitutes – possibly even preferable substitutes – to slow, minor incremental improvements won in the political arena. In the words of an antiwar activist quoted in the UNSW student newspaper Tharunka, ‘What’s the use of a protest that offends no one?!’	9
Michigan State University ERIC FREEDMAN

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