Banner at head of march
Judging by their website, event organisers were concentrating on getting a sufficient number of bodies to the end-point of the march – Princes Bridge over the Yarra River – to form the human sign which would then be photographed from the air. According to the website the march was due to leave the State Library at 12 noon (http://www.waw.org.au/index.php/page-eighteen.html), with the first walkers arriving at the bridge at 12.30, and the whole thing finished by 1pm (http://www.waw.org.au/index.php/marshalls-information.html). It was as well that this timetable was not kept to, since posters and other materials advertising the rally gave 12 noon as the start time for the rally, and it was only after that time that any serious numbers of people began gathering at the State Library. At 11.50 there were perhaps two hundred, but by the time the speakers had finished and the march set off – about 12.50 – this had swollen to some thousands, although I don’t feel able to endorse the figure of 40,000 claimed by the WAW website …
Posts on Melbourne Indymedia should fill in the details of the speakers, and there are aerial photos on the WAW website (http://www.waw.org.au/), so what is posted here concentrates on the contribution of some of the various groups and individuals who came to express their concerns. A slideshow containing these and several other photos is in preparation.
At the State Library:
Anti-US protest
One sign of an anarchist presence ...
Several banners and placards advocated a vegan lifestyle as a solution
A rather sad detail from the preceding - probably not connected
See following for the text of the message
Detail of preceding
The Socialist Party stall - the police later wanted to have it moved ...
On the march (in no particular order):
One of the many local climate action groups
Another individual statement
There was a fair sprinkling of Greens triangles in the crowd
Planet Earth
FoE seem to have borrowed a banner from Brisbane?
There were quite a lot of young children there
... and young people generally.
The environmental bike band
The Greenpeace float
One of the few signs of a union presence, although there was also a contingent from the LHMU
We saw this last year as well
The pink and black bloc, near the end of the march, with perhaps the final word ...
There will be a link here when the slideshow is available; videos from previous years can be found on EngageMedia (http://www.engagemedia.org/Members/pc/videos/waw06-melb.avi/view http://www.engagemedia.org/Members/pc/videos/waw-11nov07-engage.avi/view and http://www.engagemedia.org/Members/pc/videos/15nov08-waw_transcoded.avi/view)
The slideshow is also available on YouTube:
Added 16 December – for some reason this got left off:
Another view of the Pink and Black bloc
