APEC Protest - An Eyewitness Account

It’s finally all over. The politicians have gone, the roads are re-opening, the word ‘APEC’ can no longer be overheard in the office any more, like it never happened.

I went to bed at 8:30 on Friday night, not feeling very well, and the next morning I still felt a bit off. But no way was I going to miss the protest!

What can I say? It was weird. Grim-faced police were everywhere, in military formation. It was like something from old Nazi footage, or rare film glimpses into despotic Asian regimes. Of course I’d been expecting the heavy police presence but knowing is not the same as experiencing something for yourself.

As some of the news channels reported, there was an upbeat, almost carnival atmosphere, at least at the beginning when we rallied round Town Hall. There were all your usual demo types – the hippies young and old, students, shaven-headed lesbians, wacky hair people, drummers (they were good!) etc. Lots of average looking people too, including the Man and me, and old people. We covered the street outside Town Hall as well as the Town Hall area itself. There were heaps of police looking on, and huge police van/bus type things blocking off the road towards Circular Quay. No-one seemed too bothered. It was your standard protest atmosphere. Several speakers addressed the crowd but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I think the speakers were facing in the opposite direction to me, or maybe I was just too far away. It went on for a while – at least an hour – and I was certainly ready when we finally started moving. I felt like a ripple of excitement went through the crowd.

So it was a pretty upbeat group that started up the road towards Hyde Park. Expressionless police lined the streets on either side of us. Thousands were there. The Man stopped walking and started watching the march instead, and I had a go at him, saying we should be marching, not standing still (yup, that’s the kind of person I am!). But it turned out to be a good choice because then we got to see the sights! One group drew to a halt near us and pulled out a US flag. Then a lighter. I admit to feeling a thrill of horror – why? Social conditioning I guess – and I thought surely he can’t be going to burn it. (I can’t say I’m a big fan of flag burning. It seems a bit pathetic, like the ferals you see on television, burning the US flag in the Middle East. I might support their cause, but seriously, have some class!) Anyway, they drew a crowd in about two seconds flat so that I could barely see what was going on, but yes, they did burn it, though it fizzled rather flamed. And I was feeling so defiant and provoked by the police that I was glad they had burned it, and I hoped that shitty police commissioner was appalled.

There was another drama when this group of black-suited young guys carrying signs saying stuff like ‘Billionaires for Bush’ (ok, I don’t remember what it was exactly but they’re on one of the news videos on the internet) were doing a bit of question and answer with the crowd on the fringe, parodying the pro-Bush camp and pantomiming their delight in war and exploitation. It was all a satire, and I think everyone realized this, except for a policewoman who I heard saying into her radio ‘We’ve got a situation here.’ The police took away the guys’ signs.

Yeah, we have a situation – an IQ-deficit in the state police. But the guys refused to be goaded. Seriously, what do the police think? That we're animals?

Once we were nearly at the end of the march (and it wasn’t a long route) I looked back. There were heaps of people at our end of the march, only a smattering of people in the middle, and lots at the back – moving back the way they came, towards the police vehicles. Something was up. I assume now that the crowd was pulling towards the arrests and stuff that you might have seen on TV. Anyway, there was no way I wanted to go anywhere near it the crowd was getting ugly.

The atmosphere was tenser at this point. The threat of violence was in the air –but on the part of the police, not the protesters.

Now I’m not the most observant of people, and it took me a minute or two to realize that we’d come to the end of the march and were confronted with a row of robo-cop style federal police. I was pretty tired by then. I wasn’t sure which way everyone else had gone. I could see some people jumping up the bank of the park and picking their way through the flowerbeds, but I thought that could hardly be the official route. We couldn’t go back, obviously, and continuing up the road on the other two sides was out of the question because the robo-cops had it sealed off. So we dithered for a while, not knowing what to do.

Finally we climbed up into Hyde Park, and set off towards David Jones. Because I needed a fruit juice and some scone-type refreshment after all that excitement! The road was lined with more feds, facing outwards towards the park, staring straight ahead. Now I do believe I’ve already intimated that I’m not the sharpest cookie, and I was all for lighting out across the road there and then – after all, there was no traffic! The Man had to gently point out to me that the police were not going to let us across. We’d have to go round. I guess they were afraid we’d start a 2-person riot in the middle of the road! Ahead of us, two old ladies were shouting at the police how disgusting it all was, and what a waste of money.

We walked the gauntlet, the two of us and several other people, and collapsed into David Jones with relief. “So this is how they get people to go to David Jones” said an English tourist ahead of us.

After our refreshment, we tried to leave the way we came, but it turned out they’d locked that door (I’d like to point out that NOTHING was going on in the street outside) so we had to use the side door. The police wouldn’t let us back along Elizabeth Street, so we used a parallel street a couple of blocks down. When we were level with the crossroads where the march had finished, there was an alarming sight – a line of policeman was pushing towards the scattered people. A policeman was standing on a vehicle yelling at people. It was not nice. I felt a thrill of fear and thought the long hoped-for (by the police) riot must have ensued. I later found out from the news that the police had simply decided they were going to use heavy-handed tactics to force people out of Hyde Park – a place they had every right to be – but in the end, they’d given up and people had dissipated naturally.

I went home feeling proud to have been part of that peaceful march. I didn’t know then about the arrests, but let’s face it, in a crowd that size, they were marginal and it was a peaceful demonstration. I was elated, and was sure that we’d all been vindicated and the public would now have to start asking the police some hard questions about their behaviour that day. Imagine my outrage when I listened to the seven and nine news later that afternoon and heard their excited, alarmist reports about attacks! Violence! Arrests! Injuries! Pictures of people with blood running down their faces! Mayhem! I was like, seriously, were these reporters even in the same city as me? I will never trust the media again. Pictures CAN lie in their own way.

SBS and the ABC did, I feel, provide fair coverage of the event. There were some scary pictures of violence and arrests that may or may not have been deserved (and I'm being charitable to the police here). Fair enough, it happened, show the pictures on the news. I don’t expect them to devote 5 minutes of coverage showing people doing nothing but marching, when there were other noteworthy events. But there’s no need to blow everything out of proportion just to boost your ratings. It was PEACEFUL, and the police should be ashamed of themselves for their pathetic macho display. I didn’t know whether to laugh – all this for little me and some girls with flowers painted on their faces? – or cry. I think two German guys said it all (on a video on the internet) when they said something to the effect of “in Europe, we don’t bring out riot police and water cannons unless we attend to use them”. I bet a lot of the police out there on Saturday were fulling hoping to use them.

Roll on the election!