23 January – Anti-Colonial graffiti painted around Sydney in the lead-up to the annual carnival of Australian nationalism.
Solidarity with all who resist.
via: Insurrection News
23 January – Anti-Colonial graffiti painted around Sydney in the lead-up to the annual carnival of Australian nationalism.
Solidarity with all who resist.
via: Insurrection News
Indymedia: On the 26th of January, the 226th year since the British Naval fleet of Arthur Philip landed on this territory, we made some modest actions to counter the colonial narrative of ‘Australia’. 4 banners denouncing the nationalist holiday were hung from highway bridges in Broadway, Stanmore, Kogarah and Sutherland reading:
STOLEN LAND
NO PRIDE IN GENOCIDE
FUCK AUSSIE PRIDE
BURN THE (AUSTRALIAN FLAG)
Continue reading “Sydney: more actions against ‘Australia day’”
Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within
– Oodgeroo Noonuccal 1970
On the night of January 26th, while drunken nationalists celebrated the 226th anniversary of a British military invasion, some unaustralians vandalised the facade of the Ryde electoral office of Victor Dominello, the state minster for Aboriginal affairs and for citizenship.
On the same day in 1938 Aboriginal activists demonstrated for citizenship rights in their stolen lands, rights which were not granted until 1967. Yet citizenship has done little protect aboriginal people from poverty, prisons and police persecution. It has not recovered their stolen lands, and neither will the new Abbott approved call to recognised indigenous people in the constitution, another empty gesture like Rudd’s cheap apology.
When politicians talk of reconciliation, they seek to silence those who call for land rights and autonomy, to put an end to Koori resistance with some hollow words and ceremonies, while leaving the sovereignty of the state untouched.
From the White Australia Policy to Operation Sovereign Borders, citizenship itself is mechanism of state oppression, where politicians and bureaucrats grant select privileges to some while excluding and criminalising those deemed unworthy or ‘illegal’. Continue reading “Sydney: (more) Invasion Day vandalism”
24 January: Graffiti denouncing Australia Day as ‘Invasion Day’ has been daubed along the foreshore at Sydney’s Botany Bay.
Anti Australia Day slogans were painted on retaining walls, toilet blocks and other structures along an 8km foreshore stretch overnight, prompting a council clean-up on Friday.
24 January, ABC: The historic Cooks’ Cottage, on the outskirts of Melbourne’s CBD, has been graffitied with anti-Australia Day slogans again.
The building in the Fitzroy Gardens was vandalised overnight, with slogans including “26th January, Australia’s shame” and another containing profanity.
Vandals sprayed fluorescent-coloured paint across the historic cottage and smashed a window in.
Police believe light globes filled with paint were also used to vandalise the second storey of the cottage.
It is the third time the building has been vandalised in a year; it was sprayed twice in the days after Australia Day last year.
February 6: Council workers hosed off graffiti from Captain Cook’s cottage done as an anarchist attack for Invasion Day (a statement can be read here).
Or, as one radio station put it: “An online anarchist group protesting white settlement has since taken responsibility for the attack.”
According to ABC news: “It is the second such attack in little more than a week.”
Edited to add: “Melbourne City Council revealed the cottage had been paint-bombed on January 28, with a subsequent graffiti attack on February 4 in which the words, ‘Cappy Cook was a crook killer liar theif’ (sic) were spray-painted across the brickwork.” (The Australian)
A news broadcast showing the graffiti can be seen here.
(More Invasion Day activities can be read about here and here.)
Indymedia: On the evening of the 25th of January 2013 a banner of solidarity was hung on the Sydney University fence. This was the evening before the day of celebration that takes part across Australia.
Yabun is a near by celebratory event of survival for Koori people. It is a patch in the geography of the larger space, a country that is dominated that day by celebrations that are void of the recognition of Koori struggle, the celebrated colonial nationalism or ‘Aussi racist culture’. Continue reading “Sydney: solidarity with Koori fighters”
Source. Posters from the walls of Melbourne, photo taken the day before Invasion Day. The text under the image says “Police Station and Court House on Palm Island, burnt to the ground during uprising, November 2004.”
Sydney’s contribution to Invasion Day can be seen here.
Anarchist News: The monuments and museums that fill this dead city only enrage us.
They impose on public space the supplanting society’s creation myth.
The creation myth of Australian society is that rather than looting, murdering, and displacing the original inhabitants, the Europeans were bringing a higher order of civilisation, economic organisation and religion to savage lands.
The denial of this brutal and revolting history is nowhere more evident than on the 25th of January, the celebration of Australia Day – the date of invasion.
This is why we trashed the absurd shrine to genocide, Captain Cooks Cottage, with paint. Continue reading “Melbourne: Captain Cook’s Cottage Trashed With Paint for Invasion Day”