Overland lecture | Sylvia Lawson

DESECRATION & DEFACEMENT

IN AUSTRALIA, the anti-war protests of early 2003 are now all but forgotten. In recalling one instance of spectacular and passionate protest, I am arguing that our amnesia connects with the general sleepy indifference to the tally of civilian deaths in Iraq. It also presents a pathetic contrast to the lively, ongoing anti-war dissidence in the US itself. Here, the war has become so much monotonous background noise. Australia’s position toward Washington as a supine little colony, rather than a grown-up critical ally, infantilises the country. Like children, we are told what we are to think about in local and global affairs; raising other matters is disruptive, out of order.
    The Opera House protest of 18 March 2003 is a story with more concentrated symbolic value than its main actors probably intended. The action itself was brave, swift and romantic; for many witnesses, both on the ground at the time and everywhere at large from TV and internet images, it was highly exhilarating, a great moment of political and emotional release. It was in the official reaction – a matter of immediate ruthless censorship, conviction for ‘malicious damage’ and protracted draconian punishment – that the affront to the state was manifest.
    This had everything to do with the status of the building, a prestige object of acknowledged national significance. I want to raise the question of what the Opera House represents, historically and now; of how it has been damaged, and how not. I will consider the censorship of the anti-war protest at the building, and connect this to other major instances of censorship in our present situation: censorship which, because we’ve become so used to it, we can no longer see for what it is.

RED PAINT, WHITE PAINT
Mr David Burgess is a film-maker and environmentalist; he has been active in anti-logging protests, facing bulldozers in several New South Wales forests and in Papua New Guinea. Dr Will Saunders is an astronomer, who came to Australia in 2000 on a five-year contract with the Anglo-Australian Observatory; his speciality is the design of astronomical instruments. In February 2003 he accepted a continuing appointment with the observatory, intending to stay in Australia. He knew that conspicuous anti-war action might endanger his working visa, but he felt a passionate opposition to the war, which, as he said publicly, had to do with belonging to two countries; George W. Bush needed something that looked like a coalition, and so Howard and Blair didn’t simply allow him to go to war, they actively enabled it.
    The two met through a green group in 2002, and as long-term activists, they shared their concern that war was looking inevitable. They saw it coming early and, as documents recently published have shown, they were right: the Bush regime’s commitment to the invasion never did depend on the pursuit of WMDs, and it was operative from July 2002 if not earlier.
    Will wanted to go off and be a human shield, and made a plane booking for Amman. He was talked out of that, and let the booking lapse; then after the major demonstrations of mid-February 2003, he and Dave agreed do something toward sustaining the momentum. They also agreed that one more anti-war message on some well-graffiti’d wall in Newtown would make no difference to anything. Their gesture must express, as conspicuously as possible, Australian opposition; but no-one should get hurt. Will said that when Dave mentioned the Opera House, he gulped three times; but he’d already declared that he was prepared to be arrested. Nowhere else had that kind of visibility, and the glazed tiling was certain to be cleanable.
They reconnoitred, calculated the climb, and took the train to Circular Quay on the morning of 18 March. Two friends came with them, carrying notes to be delivered to the Opera House security staff and the police. The notes said that the two were engaged in a peaceful protest against the US-led invasion of Iraq, that their action involved no danger to themselves or to others, and that they would co-operate with the police and Opera House authorities.
    On the western side of the building there are three points where the roof structure meets the Broadwalk at difficult 60-degree angles; they finish the gutters defining the side shells from the great main shell on one side and the smaller, southward-facing one on the other. Looking at those points, I still can’t imagine how they did it; while each gutter makes a kind of path, it’s steep and curving, with nothing to hang on to. However it was, they reached the central joint of the roof, and climbed the steep spine of the major arch, carrying eight litres of deep red oil-based paving paint, with a tray and roller and telescopic extension rods. The backpacks must have been heavy.
    Dave poured paint and spoke to the police on his mobile, while Will handled the rollers, leaning across the rail, working fast, putting on three coats, and making the letters very large. They were five metres high, stretching across the whole top third of the arc, dominating the building’s profile as seen from the quay area, from the office towers across the southern end of the CBD, from the Harbour Bridge and from the air. Most conveniently, a Channel 9 helicopter was circling the inner harbour at the time. In no time flat, the image had flashed around the globe. Unequivocally and immediately, it meant that however Australia might be numbered in the coalition of the willing, it was not with the full consent of the Australian people. In that sense, almost instantaneously, it was mission accomplished.
    Will was working on the R, paint dripping down the tiling, when they saw the two jump-suited officers from the Rescue Squad coming up the walkway. As they arrived, Will asked if he could finish, and the answer was no; but then, as the officer told him he was under arrest, he managed to get in another few seconds of paintwork. Other police arrived; one said, “Nice view from up here, boys”. Packing up – it was quite easy there right at the top, where the walkway flattens out – they had no chance to notice the audience reaction down around the waterfront. Passengers on the crowded ferries, churning in to the quays, saw something utterly startling; there were gasps, cheers, sounds of offence, instant babblings of argument.
    Some have said they felt real elation and release, a sudden sense that this war didn’t have to happen, that ordinary human beings could choose after all not to do it. But Annabelle Lukin – an academic linguist who, as it happened, was researching the language of war – reacted differently. She came in on the Manly ferry, rounding Bennelong Point close in to dock; she looked up, felt a second’s shock, and then a drop into absolute gravity: “I love the Opera House, and normally I’d hate to see anyone defacing it. But not then – that anyone could feel driven to do that showed me how desperate the situation was. What they did was right.”
    Getting down was a cumbersome business, and they had paint all over them. They climbed through the hatchway, and were formally arrested on the next level; then the awkward procession moved down on steel ladders and narrow walkways, through the above- and backstage levels of the Concert Hall, finally passing a crowded space on ground level near the loading dock. It was packed with stagehands and musicians in mid-rehearsal. The news had spread fast through the building. The music stopped dead, and as they were led through, the players and stagehands cheered and clapped them all the way through to the police wagon in the underpass.
    They were charged with malicious damage, and after several hours locked up, they were bailed, and walked out to meet a pack of journalists. On that and other occasions, both insisted that they had taken no pleasure in the action; Will said he had never intentionally damaged property before, “and I hope never to have to again”. Dave offered apologies to anyone who was offended by the action, but, he said, “this was a day in our history like no other”. Almost immediately, Will was re-detained and asked to wait, while one particularly kind and friendly officer talked to him at some length about how difficult he found it to police unpopular government policies. Then the man from DIMIA (Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs) appeared, and Will was told that he could well be judged “a danger to the peace and good order of the Australian community” and deported in consequence.
    The two hoped for a deal with the Opera House, so that they’d meet the costs of the clean-up and contribute their own labour to the work, while avoiding criminal prosecution and gaol. The police seemed to view the episode with complete tolerance, but the Opera House management wouldn’t hear of it, and some blistering words came down the phone line. Both the building’s authorities and the state government’s were in the highest agitation. They’d all been made to look foolish, and this action, which couldn’t have been more conspicuous, was an intolerable affront. The state premier, Bob Carr, went into security overdrive. He said: “This is a dishonourable way of making a protest because it defaces a beautiful piece of our public property.” The scandal, however, was less in the protest, even the defacement, than in the fact that nobody had stopped it.
    The Opera House CEO, Dr Norman Gillespie, had ordered that the paint be cleaned off immediately. A firm called Techni-Clean, reportedly specialists in eliminating graffiti, was summoned; before the red paint was dry, the abseiling workmen quickly got it covered over with white paraffin wax.
    This was like saying: this didn’t really happen, cover it up now, it mustn’t be seen. People I’ve spoken to, gentle liberal conservatives, have said: Why couldn’t they have left it, just for twenty-four hours? Given the degree of opposition to the war at that stage – some tallies showed disapproval reaching 85 per cent – keeping the No War message on the Opera House for twenty-four hours would have been a reasonable measure of tolerance, leeway for peaceful citizens’ protest.
    No way. Next morning the abseilers from Techni-Clean came back; using very hot water forced through high-pressure hoses, they cleared away the white wax, then worked on the scarlet letters. Because the paint hadn’t been dry to begin with, the process yielded a highly eloquent public image, the huge red letters remaining legible as the paint flowed down the whole side of the major shell. Some witnesses said it was as though while the bombs began falling on Baghdad, the Opera House itself was weeping and bleeding, as though from an open wound. The Sydney Morning Herald ran an eloquent four-column photograph of the clean-up in process, with some clear subeditorial sympathy. The heading ran “Opera House is theatre of war no more”, and the caption began: “Blasted out of memory . . .” As, quite irretrievably, it was not.
    By then John Howard had publicly confirmed Australia’s commitment to the invasion. (Immediately, in Qatar, Al-Jazeera pounced on the irony: Howard was marching out in the Middle East to help liberate those to whose kin he had refused shelter – again and again, implacably – when they came as asylum-seekers to Australia.)
    For themselves, Will and Dave thought Dave would be allowed to keep his job with a large environmental organisation, but that Will might well be ejected from the Observatory, a major institution in the national scientific establishment. What happened was the opposite. At the Observatory’s Epping offices next day, Will got congratulations and near-universal support. Later the whole staff weighed in to supply the character references requested by DIMIA; finally, when those were coming in by the truckload, the embarrassed bureaucrats asked Will to call a halt.
    It was Dave, much less securely employed, who was pushed out; a month later his employers told him they no longer needed a forestry officer – although he found that they hired another one not long afterwards. He settled in to a chancy routine of odd-jobbing through an agency, driving trucks, building sets and shifting scenery. At times those jobs took him back to the Opera House, where – as he likes to remember – he found himself one day touching up a set with the same colour and brand of paint as they’d used on the roof.
    Meanwhile the Daily Telegraph said the community was entitled to be outraged. Terms like desecration, defacement and vandalism were scattered around online and in print, and they got some serious hate-mail – one person wanted them chained to the site in leg-irons to do the cleaning up, then (both) deported; another said they were exactly like Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers from September 11.
    But most mail was overwhelmingly supportive, and it came from around the world. In exchanges with friends and fellow professionals, some with links in the Middle East, Will found gratitude that people in Australia cared enough to protest, anger that the Western media were falling into line with their political leaders, fear for people in harm’s way. Replying to one correspondent, Will wrote: “I think many of us who are trying to stop this insanity are haunted by the thought that many people in Iraq will be willing the war, to end the terrible things that have been happening in Iraq – with the connivance of western governments – for so long.”
    There was a message from an Aboriginal community in the Territory, letters in unconventional English from recent immigrants, expressing shock for Australia’s support of the war; from old acquaintances – “I am proud of you and your actions … what you did was because you felt so deeply about the way this has been done in our name” … Someone invoked Oscar Wilde: “Disobedience is man’s original virtue” … “What the good lads did to the Opera House provided a beacon of hope … when I was seriously considering leaving the country.”
    In the District Court of NSW the two were found guilty of malicious damage. They had chosen to appear before a jury; they and their counsel had worked hard on their defence, and they seriously believed that a conviction was unlikely. But Judge Martin Blackmore, a true black-letter lawyer, would not allow that the political context of the action made any difference; this case of defacement and damage was like any other, and the war was no excuse. He wouldn’t allow them to present a defence of any kind, or even to say that one had been prepared: they were silenced. Nor could they lodge an appeal before being sentenced.
    After the first sentencing hearing on 11 December, both finally got their say in public statements. Will said: “The governments of my countries of birth and residence were about to embark on an unprovoked and illegal invasion, on the basis of lies knowingly told, and against the wishes of their peoples. I say that each of these elements is clearly established, and that there is no greater wrong governments can do …”
    Dave’s statement began: “I did this as an act of civil disobedience against a war I feel is illegal, immoral and will have terrible consequences for our country. Having watched our Prime Minister and his government ignore the wishes of the vast majority of the Australian people and flout the international statutes and safeguards of the United Nations and the Geneva Convention, I felt betrayed by our democratic system … [the act] had to be as strong as possible while not being violent.”
    There it seemed that they were trying to break through the blanket of indifference which, nine months after the invasion began, seemed to have settled on Australia. On 30 January 2005, they were sentenced to nine months’ periodic detention and $151,000 fine and compensation – close to ten times the police estimate of the damage. The amount was much contested, and I am reliably told that some of the Opera House staff wanted to issue a statement in Will’s and Dave’s defence. The management clamped down on those moves, and the personnel silenced; their jobs were at risk.
    Again there were messages of support: “Dudes, I’ll be happy to contribute”; “I wish I could pay the lot for you because that was one hell of a way to protest” … “I do not have any money otherwise I would give you all I had. Those fuckers of the fifty-third state will be out to get you guys …”
    So it seemed. Will and Dave were the first peaceful protesters to be gaoled in Australia since the Vietnam war. Six months on from the sentence, when both had spent several months of weekends in detention, an appeal was heard; their counsel told the court that the action had been “an attempt to affect a decision which would cause death and destruction on a large scale”. He cited a British precedent which states that “a person may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of a crime”.
    Rejecting the argument, Justice Michael Adams said: “The logic of the argument applies to every act of terrorism. All terrorists say we are doing this to defend our homelands, our people …” This didn’t quite amount to calling Will and Dave terrorists. It was rather what lawyers know as the floodgates principle: let this lot through, and there’ll be a whole horde of troublemakers coming after them.
    After another six months of deliberation, the court rejected the appeal and confirmed the sentences, which were not completed until late August 2005. Meantime, among friends and supporters, a trust had been set up to raise the money demanded; a successful small business grew up, turning out snowdomes, fridge magnets, T-shirts, cards and stubby holders. Within each snowdome – they’re much like the one in Citizen Kane – the miniature Opera House shows NO WAR in red lettering on the crest.
    Will arranged to pay $1000 a month from his salary. Dave made the video, Seeing Red. Website and email circuits hummed, and there were hugely successful benefit nights in pubs and small galleries. By now the snowdomes are scattered around the world, and it has been romantically said that owning one is a small way of showing which side you’re on (but it is also the case that some quite conservative recipients treasure them as well). The central images in Seeing Red, and the tiny models in the domes, become emblematic, at once comic and serious; changing the Opera House while also keeping it, binding it into history. These images will never be acknowledged in the building’s abundant official iconography, and the event will not be mentioned in the bland accounts approved for relaying by the tourist guides to the building.
    Through the process, Will and Dave never went in for false heroics, nor lost their sense of absurdity. (Deflecting a rhetorical tribute one evening, Will said they were just a pair of gonzos who’d got fired up.) Once on the No War website, however, they did link their effort to a major strand in the moral tradition; they ran this quote from Gandhi: “What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
    This was appropriate. The action was classically Gandhian in that no-one was hurt, no real damage was done, and the meaning was unmistakeable. They know their punishment, however excessive, was a small thing in the wider picture; they know also that they were very far from alone. Elsewhere in Australia and around the world, there were other places where the words NO WAR had been spelt out, large-scale, in March 2003, and other places where protesters were arrested and gaoled.
    In Italy, hundreds of protesters blocked the trains carrying US men and weapons to a military base near Pisa, and dockers stopped work in protest, rather than load shipments of arms for the Gulf. Ten people were arrested at Shannon airport outside Dublin for trying the stop the refuelling of USAF planes bound for Iraq. Around the world, activist theatre groups ran readings of Lysistrata, Aristophanes’ anti-war comedy, a piece of performative activism two thousand years old.
    In the event, the giant NO WAR remained in place, in full red view over the city, for three or four hours at most, on that building’s highest sail, for just one morning of a brilliant Sydney autumn. Ruthlessly censored though it was, its work was done.

THE BUILDING AND THE STATE
Before the appeal was determined, the state government finalised its response. A new allocation of $13.6 million was made for upgrading security at the Opera House, and another amendment was added to the Sydney Opera House Trust Act (a veritable midden-heap of amendments, piling up steadily since 1960; a long, strange record of the wrestlings of politics and culture). The 2004 amendment provided for new penalties: trespassing on the building can now mean two years’ gaol, a fine of $22,000, or both; trespassing with intent to cause damage incurs a maximum sentence of seven years, and damage performed, intentionally or recklessly, a five-year sentence.
    These provisions connect with the Summary Offences Act list, which includes climbing up a public building and possession of a spray-paint can without lawful excuse. The state’s attorney-general, Bob Debus, said that many people had been concerned “about the damage done to the Opera House sails last year” and that the new laws would “ensure that such damaging acts are punished appropriately”.
    This was overkill; they’d already passed an amendment to crimes legislation to take account of possible terrorism, providing new penalties in fines and imprisonment (up to seven years) specifically for defacing or damaging the Sydney Opera House. Those provisions had been announced in January, a few weeks before Will and Dave’s sentencing. It seemed like an attempt by the government to save face after the security failure of the No War protest. It could also have been seen as an attempt to influence the proceedings toward the sentence.
    During parliamentary debate in late June 2004, one member of the Liberal (read conservative) state opposition, a Democrat and the Greens’ energetic Lee Rhiannon joined, in an odd momentary coalition, to comment on the government’s ways of covering its embarrassment. Rhiannon praised the alleged vandals for their courage, and challenged those Labor members of the government who had once marched against the Vietnam war and supported principled civil disobedience: “The Greens would like to hear from some of those people from the Labor left. The vandalism is the war that this Government supported; that is a huge crime. How do they feel about this silencing of activism?”
    The confusions in the public response are thickly tangled: the security anxieties of the political leadership, with state authorities desperate to prove their control both to the federal government and their own populations; the peculiar status of the Opera House as a secular cathedral, the suggestion that this act amounted to a sort of blasphemy; and with that the Opera House management’s own commercial anxieties, an odd suggestion that the fiery peace message might have driven the tourists away. (It might well, of course, have drawn them closer; you never know.)
    The Opera House management issued a statement that as an arts institution, the building could have nothing to do with the war or politics; that, in Dr Gillespie’s words, the protest action had been “a totally unacceptable use of Australia’s most significant international tourism and cultural landmark to promote a political message”. Dr Gillespie had won his appointment in 2002 because of a special blend of qualifications; besides a track record in business management (much of that within the oil industry), he holds degrees in musicology and literature. In his statement, he registered the antique and discredited tradition that art and politics can somehow be sealed off from each other, held apart.
    Perhaps he had yet to learn that no story disrupts that tradition more decisively than that of the Opera House itself. With all its glamour and standing, this building is a deeply ruptured, compromised major object. It is by now well known, even to younger generations, that the architect Jørn Utzon and his team were unjustly forced to leave the building site in early 1966. The exhilarating outward structure was then essentially in place, but the interiors which would have matched it, and also fulfilled the difficult brief on acoustics, were still in the course of planning. That planning was fatally obstructed, not only by grudging politicians, but no less by malice and jealousy on the part of the local architectural profession; for this was always an immigrant story, one marked by deep cross-cultural misunderstandings.
    In the outcome, the dated kitsch of the interiors, designed by a government-appointed consortium after the architect’s departure, is profoundly at odds with the splendid structures which contain it. The inside doesn’t understand the outside; it doesn’t understand it at all. Today Utzon, who has never returned to Australia, remains a pre-eminent local hero. The cultural establishment has made him many symbolic reparations in honours and dignities, and by all accounts the man himself, at 88, is admirably free of rancour, benign in his feeling toward Australia.
    But as a managed institution, the Opera House is at least as much about tourism and money as it is a centre for the performing arts. Unlike other structures ostensibly centred on art, it has no dedicated bookshop. Until the late 1990s it contained a library and performing-arts archive, built over decades from private endowment, dedicated voluntary effort and a prolonged, painstaking assemblage of oral history, an invaluable cultural resource. In 1998 all this was dismantled, and the resources were dispersed to a range of smaller institutional libraries scattered widely across Sydney. The building no longer has a mind and memory of its own. In the brochures and the tour guides’ spiels, the issues in its history are evaded or smoothed over; ideals are denied, lying tales are told.
    The public need is that its history should be properly understood, a history which is emblematic of the whole nation’s around it. That of all buildings could have borne a spectacular anti-war message for longer than one morning. Its own history is repeatedly denied and smoothed over, like something done with white paraffin paint.

THE COST OF WAR
The full clean-up of the Sydney Opera House exterior took several days, but by the end of 19 March the words were gone. By the end of 20 March the bombing, the great fireworks, the shock-and-awe horror show was blazing over Baghdad. No-one knows when the first civilians were killed, the first houses demolished. But even before that, through early 2003, both British and American air forces were flying sorties and bombing, supposedly on specific targets; eleven civilians had already died in consequence. Australians, in general, didn’t know that. They did know that their Prime Minister had chosen on their behalf to involve this country with America in war which was precipitate and unprovoked.
    Three years on, the question of the human cost is pressing more urgently. The international media have been compliant; reliable tallies on civilian deaths have been hard to find. But then in October 2004, a landmark article appeared in the international medical journal the Lancet, where the authors estimated the civilian deaths from military action in Iraq since March 2003 at around 100,000.
    The Iraq Bodycount website publishes much lower estimates, now (April 2006) between 33,821 and 37,943, figures based on what are held to be reliable media reports. One set of figures did not, however, undermine the other; the two groups of investigators were measuring different kinds of data. Occupation and insurgency are hopelessly enmeshed, but the Iraq Bodycount investigators have distinguished between deaths from bombing by the coalition and those from crime and insurgency. What matters is that all these deaths were inside human control, they were foreseen, they were avoidable. “Stuff happens,” said the American warlord, nonchalantly.
    If the Lancet’s findings did not make major headlines, they found their way into general consciousness. Letter-writers to the liberal press seized on the ironic contrast between responses to the tsunami, on one hand, and the silence, on the other, over the carnage of war. Paul Greenway wrote from Adelaide to the Guardian that following the tsunami, “there seems no end to the misery that the media are willing and able to show us” while on the other hand, after “the preventable, deliberate invasion and occupation … the deaths of tens of thousands … uncounted hundreds of thousands of wounded … where are the graphic photos of dead and wounded Iraqis, of begging orphans, of the homes destroyed by US bombs?”
    The question was as naive as it was urgent. ‘Embedded’ journalists have necessarily limited opportunities to report on those aspects of warmongering which the military authorities don’t want them to see or publicise; that’s the whole point of the embedding practice. It is an authoritarian shackling of journalism as effective as Stalinist censorship, although it works in different ways; often the constraints are not perceived as such by the professionals themselves, and often too, journalists who are not embedded – known in the business as unilaterals – seem to be no more independent than those who are.
    In any event, the bloody devastation they have witnessed is something to which this Australian nation was made to consent. It is our business that it has happened; it is our duty to know, and the duty of our political leaders to tell us.
    Only one politician, however, has appeared to take that duty seriously. During a Senate Estimates hearing on 21 February 2005, the Labor senator John Faulkner interrogated the director-general of the Office of National Assessments, Peter Varghese, who said “… we do not have any independent information which would provide … a number based on a well-grounded source of information”. (Did the Lancet’s widely reported investigation not count as ‘well-grounded’, or did it somehow escape the attention of the ONA?)
    Faulkner asked him whether any member of the government had asked the ONA for a briefing on civilian casualties. The answer was no. Faulkner then questioned officials from the Prime Minister’s own department, and finally turned to the Minister for Defence, Senator Robert Hill. After almost an hour of it Faulkner’s anger became apparent. He said: “What I’m told is nobody knows, nobody has asked, nobody even tries to establish what the casualties might be.” Senator Hill couldn’t deny it. Faulkner finished: “I happen to think it does not suit people to find out these statistics … I am merely asking what efforts have been made. The answer is none. Nothing.”
    In a later speech, Faulkner showed something of what it means to keep awake, to refuse to become inured:

Wars are bloody and horrific. A lot of people die, and they die hard. Most of them have no connection to the abstract causes being fought for or interest in the politics that brewed the battle. Every one of them leaves a lasting wound in the lives of those who loved them.
    And knowing that, we should be very careful about when and why we go to war. It is inexcusable to pretend we can wage a war without cost, as the Howard Government is trying to do. And it is inexcusable to take our nation to war based on a lie, as the Howard Government did.
    This government didn’t have the strength to say no to the United States nor the integrity to tell Australians why we were going to war.

There, for a moment, I want to stop him; Washington isn’t the whole of the US. We could say no to Bush and yes to those who didn’t vote for him, make our links with those who still put energy, day after day, into opposition, the likes of those who keep on rowing hard against the current to record the deaths and the costs. We could be a critical ally instead of a supine little colony.
    Faulkner finished: “They ought at least to have the courage to count the dead.”
    Then, and later on ABC Radio National, he spoke of “the thousands of children killed”, and he named names. He was trying to bring the war home to his listeners, and what he chose to do was talk about children. Their twenty-first-century lives had been waiting for them, and then they were smashed. Faulkner named Bahaar Ali Kadem, two years old, killed on 20 March 2003 by a missile in Helaa Al-Kefell; and Ali Shaker Abed Al-Hassan, aged four, killed two days later, also by a missile, in Al-Bassra.

POSTSCRIPT
However little the masters of cultural institutions may like it, culture and politics go on being irresistibly, often painfully entangled. Having finished their gaol terms, Will and Dave went with friends to the Opera House on 30 August to present their cheque for the final payment of the $151,000. They had a few problems getting in; they found the staff stressed and flustered. Maximum security arrangements were in train for the impending Forbes CEO Global Conference, a major international meeting of 350 business leaders. This was hosted jointly by Forbes magazine and the NSW state government, and opened with fanfare by the Australian Prime Minister. The choice to hold this event in the Sydney Opera House was made against the advice of the police.
    In consequence both the building and the forecourt – perhaps the most significant of all the city’s public rallying places – were closed off from the public by high steel fencing erected for the occasion. It was widely known that many of Forbes’ highly placed guests were corporate leaders who strongly supported the Iraq war and were profiting from it. A peaceable protest rally, involving about 1000 people, was held at Circular Quay late on 31 August; there was then a rambling march to the barricades, attended by a hugely disproportionate force of police. There were a few arrests when a small number of people succeeded in overturning a section of the steel fence.
    Six months later, the building was used, at public expense, for the prime minister’s memorial gathering of celebrities for his friend the billionaire Kerry Packer. There were only a few protesters in the forecourt; several were arrested. They too were driven partly by intense anger that this of all public sites should be thus misused, with contempt for the people who own it.

Sylvia Lawson’s most recent book is the novel The Outside Story (Hardie Grant, 2003) which is centred on the early history of the Sydney Opera House. This essay was developed from her Overland lecture delivered 13 July 2005.

Overland 182–autumn 2006, p.20

© Sylvia Lawson

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