The changing nature of protest in Australia: Historical reflections

The literature on protest in Australia has been better on the socialists, peace activists, feminists and gays than on the kinds of people attracted to the anti-lockdown activity. These recent protests have attracted little sympathy from most Australians in 2020, but it is equally true that protest which cannot be broadly marshalled under the banner of ‘progressive’ has largely been ignored by historians more generally. It is given little weight by Clive Hamilton in his What Do We Want? The Story of Protest in Australia (2016), although he does turn briefly to ‘the Cronulla riots’ of 2005 and anti-carbon tax protest in 2011.

Part of the problem here is that those who write about protest are also narrating either their own lives or their own sympathies. Hamilton’s illustrated book, published by the National Library of Australia, struggles to integrate protest that is not obviously ‘progressive’, partly because this is a story of ‘us’ rather than of ‘them’.

In the book’s preface, he includes a mug-shot of himself in his second-last year at high school, explaining that he was ‘a foot soldier in several of the protest movements here described’. ‘For many of the young people caught up in those heady times’, Hamilton continues, ‘the protests defined us. We felt we were making the world a better place, and we were’.¹

This understanding of political protest in Australia links it to a wider social movement activity, but also to fundamental transformations in modern Australia. Sean Scalmer, in an academic study of such protest, points to the key role of the ‘political gimmick’ – an elusive category but one that draws attention to the repertoire of protest and the use of the staged event as a means of drawing media attention.

Scalmer too, is largely concerned with protest activities that we might label ‘progressive’. For instance, while drawing attention to the manner in which public