Spectacular protests against G20 meetings around the world have become something of an activist tradition. In Brisbane in 2014, it wasn’t really like that. As others have reflected before us, if the G20 week was spectacular, it was largely in terms of the disproportionate police-to-protester ratios and overblown ‘defensive’ infrastructure provided by the city to safeguard global elites. As co-organisers of some of the counter-gatherings, and participants in the marches, one might assume that the low turnout to many of these events felt to us like a bit of a fizzer. But that period of time, in all of its rocky complexities, was transformative in ways that we (the authors) still feel, even five years on. So, what of the G20 lingers so strongly?
When it was first announced that Brisbane would host the 2014 meeting, we grew angry. We were angry that the city sanctioned and supported an event that epistomised a top-down, out-of-touch mode of global decision-making that is politically reprehensible, going so far as to cash in on it as a branding opportunity. As the G20 Summit grew nearer, the inner city was walled off, increasingly surveilled, and heavily patrolled. All kinds of people were angry about being denied access to parts of Brisbane so that safety might be guaranteed to the so-called world leaders. We were angry that we were being treated like security threats in the place many of us call home. But, as the adage goes, ‘Don’t get mad, get organised!’ And organise Brisbane did.
Long before the G20 rolled into town, the Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy (BASE) and Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR) had begun planning an eight-day series of events in Musgrave Park calling out the ‘Genocidal20’, and demanding “Decolonisation Before Profit”. We weren’t directly involved in this organising work (the authors are settler-identifying), and the stories specific to it are not ours to tell. However, we attended some of these groups’ meetings and marches, and are grateful that they continued to make Meanjin/Brisbane a place in which First Nations and their allies gather, protest and stand against racist injustice and colonial oppression. There were more than a few references made, for instance, to the First Nations-led protests against the Commonwealth (or ‘Stolen Wealth’) Games in 1982, which largely took place on the same land.
Around the same time - over the 12 months or so leading up to the G20 - ‘BrisCAN’ (Brisbane Community Action Network) formed. One of the reasons BrisCAN referred to itself as a network was that it was a meeting point for, and a set of connections among, already existing social, environmental and community justice groups in the city. It brought together a few dozen community workers, artists, activists and thinkers, including ourselves (the authors), who contributed in divergent and intersecting ways to Brisbane’s responses to the G20. Each person had a different reason for being there, and no single political thread drew everyone together. Fittingly, BrisCAN came to be comprised of a number of subgroups which organised diverse but overlapping counter events. One of the smaller committees that coagulated out of the larger network worked to create a free, three-day series of talks and workshops called “Visioning Another World: The G20 People’s Summit,” in which we were more actively involved. Others organised marches, rallies, artistic interventions, study groups, a Citizen Journalist and Media Centre, and other responses too numerous to list here.
The sparks of political efflorescence that we experienced were imagined by the state and the press as a raging inferno. Over the months leading up to the event, the Courier Mail ran front-page stories warning of black bloc violence, ‘feral’ takeovers and general mayhem. The state declared areas of the city prohibited for certain categories of persons, literally moving people out of their homes for the week. Our People’s Summit organisers’ group held regular meetings at ‘The Edge’, a Brisbane City Council building where we could book comfortable meeting spaces with free wifi and the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the river. As the G20 drew closer, we watched the river fill with police boats, as more and more helicopters whizzed overhead, and on one occasion two black-clad figures erupted up out of the water on ‘flyboards’ - what looked like hoverboards propelled by massive water jets - in an absurd demonstration of the state’s new and somewhat sinister toys.
The increased visibility of state power during these months – the training exercises in public spaces, the newspaper articles detailing the police’s new equipment, the invitations from the police force to BrisCAN organisers to view said equipment in person – heightened our sense of vulnerability. This spilled into tensions between organisers at times, and was otherwise reflected in very real ways by the responses we received from members of the broader community. One of the delegated tasks we (the authors) shared was to find venues for the People’s Summit. With just-enough donations, we and others traipsed around town looking to hire almost every big open space, community hall or commercial venue we could find. We met with owners and managers, who were friendly enough to our faces, but again and again they turned us down. The reasons they gave were opaque, but we suspect that they had much to do with the fear-mongering campaign run by the press, coupled with the general climate of state surveillance and heightened police presence. This was confirmed when one venue invited a senior police liaison officer to join our meeting.
These contexts forced us to think carefully about how to present our ideas and ourselves. We were a far cry from the ‘ferals’ that the press made us out to be, but we were also unflinching and upfront in opposing how the city was being used as a service centre for the global elite. We were also diverse enough that representing ourselves, as members of BrisCAN, in any too-unified way felt disingenuous. Rather, we sought to create an event that would open up critical discussions about these and other issues to all kinds of people, without proselytising a particular position, politically or otherwise. This was a fine balancing act that we, and BrisCAN more broadly, tried to figure out as we improvised our way forward – and we didn’t always get it right.
Largely as a consequence of the disparaging media campaign, once the G20 officially kicked off, a significant portion of the city’s population had left town altogether. Still, we rolled ahead into a week of events that were dynamic and generative. We had scheduled People’s Summit discussions, speakers, gatherings and workshops in more than seven different community halls, donated commercial spaces, churches and other venues. The Summit was opened by Mr (Uncle) Sam Watson (vale!) and the People came - maybe 300 in total - over its three days. Many more were camped in Musgrave Park for the BASE response, and hundreds joined the daily protest marches from the Roma Street Forum to the Park, each with a different political point, and each led by First Nations’ righteous anger and power.
Our (the authors’) different experiences over this period make for lessons that we value in and of themselves. But as Brisbane’s politics keep moving, we find ourselves reflecting on them once again. Spectacular street protests are currently erupting worldwide – in Lebanon, Chile, Hong Kong, Colombia, and Haiti, to name a few. Meanwhile, in Brisbane, thousands of demonstrators turned up for the massive marches recently organised by Extinction Rebellion, and the school students’ climate strikes. The phenomenon of street protest can be powerful, but we think it’s also important to focus on the less visible, longer-term, messier work that underpins these upsurges. Many of the things we learned, and many of the ways in which we became different-in-the-world five years ago, were borne of this kind of collective labour.
In this sense, we learned that the work of creating alternative worlds lives within the work of building, negotiating and maintaining relationships with one another. More often than not, these processes feel tense, mundane, frustrating, confusing, and decidedly un-spectacular. We also learned that this work can become the space in which state repression is most keenly, if subtly, felt - through newly experienced vulnerabilities, uncertainties, and ramped up tensions, as the propensity to snap at one another is pushed just a bit higher. Alongside what we learned in street medic workshops for staying safe through marches and rallies, we also needed to figure out how to insulate ourselves from the ways in which state-induced stress would bubble up in the interpersonal realm, as we organised the events that would take us to the streets. But perhaps the lesson that lingers with us most - just as it did for some organisers after Seattle 1999 - lay in how we came to embrace the messiness of this work, even as it was grounds for interpersonal friction. That is - we are constantly reminded of the multiple and diverse skill-sets that went into creating the G20 counter events, the different ways in which ideas were and are made public, the challenges involved in having many different voices speak, the need to cede space so that some may finally speak over, and the tangling politics of coming together. We learned that some wrinkles don’t want to be ironed out, some kinds of messiness don’t want to be tidied - rather, the sprawling and often incommensurable diversity of our ideas and desires was the very thing that we raised against the hegemonic modus operandi of the G20 meeting.
When we look around the radical landscape of Brisbane now and think about our comrades and friends made in the thick of it, we are drawn to reflect upon the fact that even though (or perhaps because) this organising labour was messy and exhausting, it was through this work that we imagined alternative worlds. Responding to the G20 brought these worlds into being, through the relationships that formed among those involved. We include in this the complex relations of antagonism that reverberated between the divergent political and rhetorical thrusts of these responses. The echoes of these connections are still going, long after the G20 packed up and left town.
Fern Thompsett is originally from the Sunshine Coast, mostly from Brisbane, and now lives in New York City, where she is working towards a PhD in anthropology.
Sally Babidge is a political and environmental anthropologist who has made Brisbane home.
Photo by Max Riethmuller, used under Creative Commons licensing