FRIDAY 10 DECEMBER: A thick blanket of soggy heat draped over the Emerald city, rendering everything shades of yellow-grey, much like the sandstone architecture that peppers the CBD itself. Assembled are about one thousand representatives of all walks of life in Australia, to show their support for the whistleblower website Wikileaks, and its mercurial Aussie founder, Julian Assange.
In the week leading up to this demonstration, I made jokes to my family about G20-style protests for a cheap laugh. The reality was somewhat more mundane. Instead of tear gas and smashed windows, there is enough body odour to bring tears to my eyes, and men on the wrong side of 35 sporting haircuts that looked like they were done in the dark with one's hands tied behind one's back.
The story of Wikileaks is so endlessly enthralling, disturbing and entertaining all at once, it's quite like watching some political performance art play out in real time.
Anyone who has spends enough time online in Australia has probably heard of Wikileaks by now. Here is the short version: Aussie ex-hacker turned activist starts website that publishes leaked documents from government, military and corporate sectors. The goal is to instigate reform of corrupt institutions. Aussie flies around the world several times over, scoring several significant scoops and kudos along the way. Aussie receives American military classified material. Aussie starts publishing LOTS and LOTS of said documents. Aussie sleeps with two women in Sweden on two separate occasions. The two women eventually accuse him of sexual misconduct, going to the police. He is not formally charged. Four months and many disclosures later, the Wikileaks website is under denial of service attacks; major financial institutions sever ties with them, and the Americans are howling for Assange's blood. Literally. In December, wanted in Sweden for questioning over the alleged sexual misconduct, Assange voluntarily turns himself in to British police following European arrest warrant procedure. He is arrested and placed in solitary confinement in London's Wandsworth prison, held in the same cell as the one Oscar Wilde had once occupied. Finally granted bail, a wealthy supporter provides surety to allow Assange to remain under house arrest in a stately home in rural England, where he now fights his extradition to Sweden, fearing that once there, the United States government will apply for extradition to the Land of the Free in retaliation for all those naughty disclosures.
That was the short version. *cough*
At the time of today's protest, Assange was in what he described as 'Victorian' conditions in Wandsworth, and the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard had wasted no time in declaring his actions illegal - not the sexy-time stuff, the mass leaking of classified government data stuff.
So here I found myself, amongst a throng of angry but well behaved fellow city folk who had gathered to decry this political hypocrisy. For once, Sydney played the role of the intelligent, politically-engaged city to Melbourne's temporarily showy celebrity-obsessed shallowness (thanks to Oprah). It's usually the other way around.
Here's my photo gallery of the protest on Flickr.
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