Notes from a Month in Australia

A report-back from the land of weekly protests!

Last night I landed home in Portland, Oregon, from Brisbane/Meanjin, in Queensland, Australia.  Just over a month ago I flew there from here.

A few days after I arrived in Brisbane last month, the world got the news that Julian Assange was to be released from his maximum-security prison in England, and would be returning to his home country of Australia.  A few days before the end of the tour came the news of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and then Biden's resignation as presidential candidate.

The backdrop of Biden's daily decline into dementia, and the daily atrocities committed against the people of Gaza by the Israelis, was a constant.  In Australia, those daily atrocities have been met with a protest movement in solidarity with the Palestinians that has a weekly and sometimes daily presence on the streets of all the major cities, and many of the smaller ones as well.

The experience of being a protest musician doing a tour at a time like this in Australia was exactly as I remember it being in the US in earlier times, like during the Iraq war, or during the Second Intifada.  It only seems like such a welcome surprise to me because of how tremendously my experience in Australia, or last fall in Europe, contrasts with how it's been to be a protest singer in the USA, with no protests to sing at now for years.

It's a very contradictory and strange thing to enjoy a tour so much because of the outpouring of community and solidarity that we were able to be a part of everywhere, when this outpouring is a direct response to the war crimes Israel is committing against the Palestinians, with all those horrors being the basis for our collective existence.  But such protests, with all the community and mutual affection they involve, nourish the souls of the participants, even as we're all constantly preoccupied with the latest massacres at the same time.

In the past month, Kamala and I have sung at almost as many protests as we've done concerts.  Singing at the protests we've sung at, in every case, has been a matter of hearing about the protest, then messaging whoever it was who was organizing our concert in that town.  Within minutes, every time, I was in touch with protest organizers who were enthusiastically welcoming our musical participation in the next protest.

Something that becomes more and more obvious every time I travel outside of the US since last October is there are bigger populations of Arabs and Muslims everywhere else I go, like Scandinavia, England, and Australia.  In the vast majority of cases, although participation in the protests is very broad, the key organizers are from the Muslim community.  

In places like Sydney and Melbourne they have serious operations, involving big sound systems, flatbed trucks, very relevant and engaging speakers, and all kinds of artistic and powerful printed materials.  Some of the organizers remembered my music from hearing it during the the Iraq war, somehow or other, though I had not yet been to Australia back then.  In every case, there was no question at all about having music on the program, only universal enthusiasm.

I left Portland just before the hot weather was going to be setting in for the summer.  This was not the first time I've strategically visited Australia during the northern summer.  I always love it when the timing works out that way, especially having once experienced summer in Queensland, on my first visit to Australia, playing at the Woodford Festival, on tour with the late Alistair Hulett in 2008/9.  If I ever spend time in the summer in Queensland again, it will be because I got booked at that festival again.  Otherwise I'll probably manage to avoid Queensland in January, along with Texas in July.

Kamala and I sang at three protests during my first two days in Brisbane.  We had strategically kept the first several days of the tour free for rehearsing, without any gigs, but we had time for protests.

I arrived early one morning, and by the middle of that afternoon Kamala and I had set up the Brisbane chapter of the Socialist Alliance's battery-powered sound system (which we also absconded with for much of our tour, mainly to use for a couple of protests, to make sure their sound setup would be good for live music).

The first protest was at the headquarters of a member of the Australian parliament from the ruling Australian Labor Party (ALP), in a district near Kamala's home neighborhood of Brisbane that has a significant Muslim population that is widely outraged by what is broadly perceived as the ALP's support for Israel's ongoing genocidal war against the people of Gaza.

The MC for much of the rally was Phil Monsour, a fellow musician who Kamala and I would do a show with at the end of our tour, which began and ended in Brisbane.  In addition to being a skilled musician, Phil is a very dedicated organizer and advocate for the Palestinian cause, and has been since long before I first met him around 15 years ago.

Some people gave great speeches.  Other people said things that I would take issue with, but at times like these, a bit of black-and-white thinking is very understandable.

Phil didn't sing at this rally, it was just Kamala and I doing a couple songs.  This was typical of all the rallies we performed at -- there were no other live performers, just speakers.  Talking with various random people, it became clear to me that the marching drummers were the highlight of every march for many of the people in the cities where that is a regular feature.  There was a strong visual involved with this gathering, involving a very long, red piece of cloth representing the red lines that Israel has long ago crossed, that its enablers in the west have studiously ignored.

Even doing a couple songs at a rally in these times seems unusual to me, I've been so devastated by the turn towards insanity and incompetence on the part of the captured American left, perhaps especially in Oregon, and the almost complete abandonment of culture, or of serious organizing of any kind, if it can't be done on Instagram.

The following day featured another protest, where we saw more people Kamala knew, many of whom I had also met along the way, on previous tours of Australia.  It's a small left, perhaps, but an active one, and one with some continuity.

This rally was again focused on policies of the ALP, who are trying to pass through the parliament a bill that would imprison refugees who fail to self-deport.  A local Green Party parliamentarian gave a good speech, but this rally, like all the others, was notable for the complete lack of any media coverage, beyond the alternative press such as the Green Left Weekly, or the social media promotion done by protest organizers themselves.

Later on that first full day in Australia we drove south of Brisbane to the area known as the Gold Coast, to play at a Palestine solidarity rally and march that happens there every week.

This was in the city of Surfer's Paradise (here's the set we did there).  If I had ever been there before, I didn't remember.  I don't think I had.  It's a sizeable city, with lots of skyscrapers, mostly for housing well-off people or tourists who want a view of the ocean and proximity to what it has to offer.

Some Australian can hopefully correct me if I'm wrong here, but my impression is that surfing is good on much of the coastline of Australia, which extends approximately forever in every direction, most of it very thinly populated by humans (though magpies and very loud Australian crows and other raucous birds can be seen and especially heard constantly most everywhere you go).  

But despite great surfing in the less populated areas as well as in the glass-and-steel citadel of Surfer's Paradise, for some reason everyone seems to have congregated in that one part of the beach.  As we marched past block after block of restaurants and busy bars with partying tourists, in the shadow of their condos in the sky, I felt small.  If we had been singing songs and carrying powerful pieces of art in the form of giant puppets instead of chanting repetitive slogans, I think we could have made a better impression on tourists, who generally appeared a bit mystified, though not hostile.

Our first gig on the tour that wasn't a protest was all the way on the other side of the continent, in Perth.  Australia is about the size of the continental US, so that's a six-hour flight.

In Perth, Socialist Alliance was hosting their annual conference, Ecosocialism.  Kamala and I were the Saturday night entertainment for the weekend.  Our concert and most of the rest of the weekend's events were livestreamed for ticket-holders and put up on YouTube afterwards for public viewing.

Our concert at the conference is now a live album.

I attended a number of workshops and panels.  They were all on good topics.  The best part, as with most any conference, was the fact of all those like-minded people being together in one physical location.  Many of the panelists being there remotely, on a screen beside the ones that were there in person, didn't change the fact that most of those attending the conference were physically there together, and had a chance to hang out informally.

One of the more iconic leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Leila Khaled, was a keynote speaker at the conference.  Predictably, the Australian government wouldn't give her a visa to visit, so she spoke remotely, to a very appreciative audience.

The foreign guests who were there were certainly a highlight of the conference for me.  Organizers of one kind or another came from India, South Africa, Malaysia, and Singapore -- all countries that are a six-hour flight closer to Perth than they are to Sydney or Melbourne.  They seemed all to be universally freaked out by the lack of population density in Perth.  Even by the sprawling standards of the North American suburbs, Perth seems sparsely populated.

Despite the lack of population, any time you want to cross a street, you have to press a button and wait for a walk signal.  This fact was definitely not lost on one of the speakers, who quipped at one point from the stage, "Australia is a liberal democracy -- you have to press a button to cross the street!"

It's open to interpretation exactly what he meant by this, I think, but all the potential explanations that come to my mind are good ones.

One of the speakers who had come in from another country was deeply disturbed by the obvious, very visible inequities of Australian society, as evidenced by the many aboriginal people living in squalor on the streets of the city, in every direction surrounding the area where the conference was taking place.  Perhaps he also witnessed some of them being harassed by cops on one of the days the conference was happening, while he was out taking a walk, as I did.

This man seemed to be having the exact same reaction to the Australian left that I had when first encountering the Jewish Israeli left, on my first visit to Israel/Palestine.  I met lots of people who would normally be described as progressives dedicated to progressive causes.  But any time I met someone who was organizing for some cause, whatever it may be, if it wasn't centered on ending the persecution of Palestinians, it always struck me as hollow.  

For this visitor at the conference, it was exactly like that in Australia.  Why, he wondered aloud from behind the lectern, were not all members of the white Australian left primarily focused on this most obvious and most local of injustices?  How is that there's room for just about anything else?  Good questions, to which there are so many answers, none of them adequate.

The morning after flying back to Brisbane we were off, heading south in Kamala's little yellow car, loaded up with sound gear, a guitar, and other odds and ends, so there wasn't much room for anyone else in there.  If we were a trio, we would have needed a bigger vehicle for sure.

After Perth, this tour would be done by car, on a path that would take us from Brisbane to Ballarat and back.  Our first stop would be the little village of Valla, near the town of Bellingen.

The Bellingen area seems to be a center of environmental activism in Australia, along with the forests of Tasmania and other hot spots.  In Bellingen there are plans afoot for a new national park, but before land has been declared part of the park, logging companies are speeding up operations to log as much as possible.  I remember exactly the same sort of thing happening in other places in the US.

Everywhere activists block roads and challenge a logging plan, they win, apparently.  But the complaint I was hearing was there were just not enough people to get involved to block all the roads that needed to be blocked.

The folks who are doing it make up a wonderful, tight-knit community, a few dozen of whom came together for a night of music featuring us and a couple of other very engaging local musician-activists, and a whole bunch of delicious, hot food for all.  The whole scene was heartwarmingly reminiscent of Earth First! campaigns I've visited on many past occasions, mostly decades ago, especially on the west coast of the US.

In Newcastle, our next stop, a campaign to disrupt the coal trains had been going on for days by the time we got there, and would continue for weeks, maybe it's still going.  They're calling it Blockade Australia.  Looking at news stands I saw many sensational headlines about the campaign in the Murdoch-owned press.

Each day someone new has been blocking tracks in creative ways and getting arrested.  It's been a drip-drip of nonviolent civil disobedience, causing huge delays for the coal trains.  The authorities have also seen fit to delay passenger trains, which, according to people I've talked to, has not been necessary, given the locations where the coal trains are being blocked, but has been done in order to turn public opinion against the campaign.

Along the way I also ran into other people involved with organizing something called Rising Tide, which is more about large-scale nonviolent civil disobedience to shut down the coal operations.  There's some tension between the two political tendencies, with one perhaps erring on the side of militancy, and the other on the side of being more inclusive and broader-based.

The show in Newcastle featured an excellent local duo involved with the local folk club, that first brought Alistair and me to Newcastle 15 years ago.  One of the folks involved with the environmental campaigns, Annie, made abundant food for the occasion, very much like in Bellingen the night before.

Fifteen years ago I first met Peter and Pamela in Bundeena because Alistair and I were looking for somewhere to stay where there were two guest rooms available.  I've been visiting them ever since every time I'm in the Sydney area, making sure to work in extra time off in that marvelous location surrounded by the Royal National Park as often as I can.

In the Bundeena area they're also fighting against coal operations poisoning local lands and water, but the gig that Peter and Pamela were involved with organizing took place in Coledale, near Wollongong, a town I've played in often in the past, again since Alistair first brought me there.

On this occasion things didn't go so smoothly.  The Coledale veterans' hall, the Returned and Services League, as they call their equivalent of the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars associations, had recently been the venue for one of my favorite musical acts, from England, Seize the Day (who also stayed with Peter and Pamela).  They're a radical duo, but apparently something was too radical about the event involving Kamala and me, and the RSL canceled it at the last minute, claiming apparently falsely that there had been a double-booking.

With the help of a local Green Party city council member folks found another city-owned building to use for the gathering, just down the street, and the show went on.

On my last visit to Australia I visited the Addison Road Cultural Center for the first time, and was blown away.  This tour involved my second visit to the place, and once again I was blown away.  I say "I" rather than "we" here because on this weekend, Kamala wasn't at some of the gigs, she was resting in Bundeena, recovering from a virus that took away her voice, which unfortunately a condition that lasted through some of the best events, such as the one at Addi Road.

The show we did last year at Addi Road was well-attended and wonderful, but this time it was even better.  Two hundred people showed up.  They had been asked to "bring a plate," which I believe is Australian for "pot luck dinner."  What happened, predictably perhaps, was folks brought an incredible abundance of food -- big trays rather than plates, full of home-made, delicious selections from all over.  I recognized dishes from west, south, and east Asia.

The event was billed as food and music to welcome refugees from Gaza, and that's most definitely what it was.  Most of the people in attendance had not just come from Gaza, though the crowd consisted largely of people who had come to Australia as refugees at some point.  With the vast majority of the audience speaking fluent English, it's really the type of crowd I think of as the ideal audience -- that is, people from all over the Global South who speak fluent English.

The woman who is perhaps the anchor of the whole massive community project there in the Marrickville neighborhood of Sydney is Roseanna, easily spotted by the bright pink frames of her glasses, and by the equally colorful clothing that she's wearing any time I've seen her.  Roseanna has a long background organizing all over what the global justice movement calls the Global South, and she seems like a perfect person to be playing the role she plays at that magical place.  The community there has been introduced to my music because Roseanna plays it while she works.

Many people commented on the haphazard-looking trajectory of our tour, especially on that first weekend of July, playing Friday night in Sydney, Saturday night in Canberra, and then back again in Sydney on Sunday.  The reason for this geographical backtracking was simple -- Canberra has its weekly Palestine solidarity marches every Saturday, while Sydney has them every Sunday.

We left Bundeena early that Saturday morning, so we'd get to Canberra plenty early to set up for the demo, as is my tendency with everything related to my work, whether it's playing a concert or playing for free at a demo -- the flat tire principle always applies.  That is, always leave enough time for a traffic jam or a flat tire, never assume everything will go smoothly.

Folks in Canberra had been promoting the evening gig by handing out flyers for it at the weekly demos, including that one.  As a result of that and whatever other promotional activities they were engaged in, the turnout was wonderful, with the spacious Polo Club mostly filled with tables and chairs, with people sitting at them.  If we had been expecting a bigger turnout than the 75 or so people who came, we could have just lined up chairs, with fewer tables, and there'd be room at that place for many more, but in any case it had the feel of a full venue.

The following morning featured another early-morning drive, going back the way we came, heading to Hyde Park in Sydney for the demo there.

In Canberra we used our little battery-powered Bose speakers, and it worked great.  Sydney had a crowd that would have been too large for those speakers, but the organizers came with a flatbed truck and a big sound system.  Kamala was still too voiceless to sing, but as a solo performer I still went over very well, and Kamala recorded my two-song set for posterity.

At the risk of sounding terribly arrogant, singing at the rally in Sydney was a model display of the power of music at rallies.  With the large and youthful Arab and Muslim presence at the rally as well as among the speakers, many of the speakers were focusing on the necessity of resistance, and of supporting the resistance.  I had had a slightly different couple of songs in mind to do, but after hearing those speeches I changed my plan, and did songs about resistance, too -- rather than other songs that just describe how horrific the situation is.

With each chorus of "Song for the Houthi Army," and the line about them being "the conscience of us all," there was an outbreak of applause and cheers, as if everyone hadn't just heard that same chorus already.  At the end of "Boycott, Sanction, and Divest," which is when I'm chanting that phrase, everyone joined me in the chant, just as I'd hoped they would, when I wrote that song a couple months ago.  Just the sorts of crowd reactions a protest singer is looking for at a protest.  The march began after my last song.

We stuck around Sydney throughout the afternoon in order to still be in town to sing at an event for supporters of Julian Assange to celebrate Julian's release.  When we got there it became clear that the sound system at the venue wasn't one we'd be able to plug the guitar into, so rather than playing acoustically for a room that was too big for playing acoustic, we left early and called it an early night, so Kamala could finally get a good night's sleep, after me dragging her all over the place, from protests to concerts while she's sick.

After a lovely little visit to Katoomba in the lush Blue Mountains area inland from Sydney, where the temperature dropped enough to warrant wearing an actual winter jacket for the first time on this allegedly winter tour, we embarked upon the long drive to Melbourne, interrupted by a night hanging out with nice people, dogs, and horses on a farm in Glenellen.

The morning of the first day we planned to be in Melbourne we headed out early, much earlier than we needed to.  Which was good, because just north of the village of Seymour, still over an hour's drive from Melbourne, the little Hyundai's clutch cable snapped, and we were stranded.

It took the rest of the day to get sorted out with a tow truck, a mechanic, and a rental car for the weekend, while the car got repaired.  It was fortuitous actually that it broke down when it did, because we would be coming back to Seymour in a few days, as this tour was, like most any tour of Australia, a there-and-back kind of tour.  Doing a circular kind of tour in a country where most of the population lives along the southeastern coast doesn't really work very well.

There were two rallies in Melbourne related to Palestine that we attended, but didn't sing at, because the sound systems they were using didn't have enough inputs for our purposes, and we either got there too late or had to leave too early to be able to set up the gear we were traveling with.  I felt awful as I told organizers at these rallies that we'd pass on trying to sing at them, after we got there.  This is just the sort of behavior that gets musicians labeled prima donnas, but I find it very hard to avoid.

The Black Spark Cultural Center in Melbourne is still going, though with less of a vibrant feel than it had a year ago, when we played there last.  The community radio station in town was where we spent the most time.  On one morning we spent an hour and a half co-hosting the Green Left show, with lots of musical commentary.  A bunch of the folks we saw in Melbourne were folks we had also been hanging out with at the Ecosocialism conference in Perth, and were active members of the Socialist Alliance.

In Ballarat the historic trades hall is still going, with the stage in there as beautiful as ever, renovated during the pandemic.  Trades halls in other towns have been less active, according to all the rumors.  And in Ballarat, after flying the Palestinian flag atop their five-story building at some point during the course of the genocide, they got into all kinds of deep water with the local Israel-supporting community, and they've also been getting flak from some elements of the pro-Palestine community for not being radical enough, or for eventually replacing the Palestine flag with a different flag, or something.  The circular firing squad is alive and well.

Most of the small crowd that came to the gig at the trades hall there had been at the Gathering for Gaza the day before, at the botanical gardens in town, where they have a bust of Gough Whitlam, along with a lot of nice trees.  Our set was recorded for posterity.

Ballarat was the coldest place we went to, and it's apparently well-known for being the coldest town in the state of Victoria.  It even snowed somewhere in Australia while we were down there, but not where we were.  The closest thing to snow we experienced was a bit of frost on the early-morning grass in Ballarat and elsewhere in southern Victoria.

We had traveled far enough south that the angle of the sun was noticeably different, and it got darker a bit earlier in the evening.  The long drive due north after Ballarat had us in Bundeena by the end of the day, again a very different climate, several degrees warmer.

While there in the Sydney area, we met a group of filmmakers at Hyde Park to film Kamala and I singing "the Ballad of Lachlan Macquarie" in front of the giant statue of the former governor of New South Wales.  They'll be making some kind of video from this footage and other stuff they have related to the man, and to our mutual friend Stephen Langford's habit of putting Lachlan Macquarie quotes on the Lachlan Macquarie statue, and getting arrested for it.

Some of those longer drives were made very easy because we were well ensconced in an audiobook much of the time, when we weren't catching up on the latest atrocities recounted on Al-Jazeera or keeping tabs on the latest BBC or ABC propaganda.  The audiobook was called Invisible Rulers, and it's a fascinating and very useful unraveling of what the author calls the collision of the rumor mill with the propaganda machine, epitomized by the phenomenon broadly categorized as "social media" these days.

The tour's penultimate gig was in Lismore, the epicenter of the floods of 2022 that were generally known as the Lismore Floods.

We played in Lismore last year, in 2023, as well.  It hadn't been more than a few months since the water had receded, and at that time the town was a disaster, very obviously.  All the roads were ripped up and being repaved, and every inch of the town back then was basically under construction.  Anyone who had a garden or a farm had had it completely ruined, and anything growing last year had been entirely replanted.  House after house was completely ruined by floodwaters that rose more than two stories high, and stayed that way for a long time.

On this visit, what was most notable was the roads had been mostly fixed, and looked like roads in any other town now.  What didn't look like any other town was everything else.  So many of the houses were boarded up and fenced off.  Other houses were rebuilt, but often right next to houses that were surrounded by ugly metal fencing and lots of "no trespassing" signs.

On some streets, houses were being squatted.  There's a complicated system for buying houses that were ruined on the floodplains, and it's a system that seems to be chronically underfunded.  Some people get their houses bought out, others don't, and it all seems unfair to most people I talked to.  The atmosphere is depressing, and notably different from 2023 -- the hope was gone, the stories of solidarity a distant memory.  

As a visitor coming from outside of Lismore and seeing what's going on in that town now, it seems like a travesty how the whole situation is being handled by the state.  What seems to keep most people in Lismore living there is that they can be among other people who have experienced disaster and loss the way they have.

Back in Brisbane for the last weekend of the tour we had another packed room full of people at the Kurilpa Center, playing with Phil Monsour, who has gotten really good with a looping device since the last time I heard him play.  It was a much bigger crowd than the last time we played in Brisbane, mainly because it was a fundraiser for Justice for Palestine.

We chose a new band name along the way -- Ministry of Culture.  The Ministry of Culture tour continues in Oregon, California, Illinois, and Wisconsin in August!