Introduction
Just Us Journal brings together personal stories, interviews, written material, artworks and resources from a diverse range of community members. Despite their varied perspectives or interests, each contribution relates to the concepts of action, transformation or change, and seeks to support the reader in their own journey.
This journal is compiled and designed by Kelly Nefer (she/her) who is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in lutruwita/Tasmania. Within her practice she explores concepts related to empowerment, perception and justice.
Issue 1
Contents
- A brief guide to action / Hughie Nicklason
- In praise of protest / Dr. Rodney Croome
- From inaction to action / Dr. Robyn Gulliver
- Don’t eat the lies / Kelly Nefer
- Three reasons to support enviornment defenders / Dr. Emily Barritt
- Excerpts from ‘Decolorising Solidarity’ / Dr. Clare Land
- Heroes not criminals: intel from the frontline in 2024
- In conversation with Jacob Boylan
- Selected interviews
- Transformation contains profound grief & loss / Claire Burgess
- Sharing is resistance / Kathy Ehmann
- Hold on to your hope.
Excerpted Articles
Introduction
The rights and freedoms we enjoy today were established through the dedication, perseverance, hopes and sacrifices of people before us. People that became aware of injustice, and chose to take action. I’ve often pondered what we could achieve, if more people became involved in each movement if there were more hands, minds and hearts to share the load.
Maybe we would never be completely free of greed or the desire to dominate, but we could certainly tip the scales so that they have less influence. There is enough dormant power on this planet to do that… once the individuals holding it realise they can make a difference in the issues they care about, and that they’re not alone.
The various content within these pages examine this choice to act – and some of the forces (internal/external) that fight against it. Whilst there is mention of specific issues and perspectives, it does not suggest something not mentioned is any less important. It is all interconnected
So…
How can we activate and support more people to participate in collective resistance?
How can we transcend the mentalities of othering, consumption and self-absorption when they are so deeply embedded in the fabric of colonised society?
How can we create safe, connected and resilient communities?
There’s no simple answer to these questions, and it’s not going to be the same process for everyone. But it is a process – one of transformation – that I hope more individuals will eventually undergo.
May this give you strength to continue, or a place to start.
In Praise of Protest
by Dr. Rodney Croome
Originally published in The Tasmanian Times on August 8, 2022
Rodney Croome is a long-time advocate for LGBTIQA+ equality in Tasmania, nationally and internationally. He was awarded an order of Australia in 2003, named Tasmanian Australian of the Year in 2015 and made a Doctor of Letters by the University of Tasmania in 2019.
The Tasmanian LGBTIQA+ community’s long history of protest has helped make our state a better place. The Government’s anti-protest law would have silenced us and, in turn, held Tasmania back.
By my rough count there have been about 100 LGBTIQA+ protests in Tasmania in the last thirty five years. They include LGBTIQA+ people and our allies:
- being arrested at Salamanca Market for defying a council ban on our stall
- holding vigils against hate at anti-gay rallies in the north
- handing out stones to the flocks of anti-gay bishops
- holding protests in and around Parliament including ringing the building with gay law reform supporters and conducting a kiss-in
- handing ourselves in to the police
- protesting against the 2004 same-sex marriage ban outside politicians’ offices
- conducting mock weddings
- gathering spontaneously to commemorate the victims of LGBTIQA+ massacres overseas
- protests against the Religious Discrimination Bill
- gathering on footpaths outside Australian Christian Lobby conferences to protest the ACL’s anti-LGBTIQA+ campaigning
- protesting at the Magistrate’s Court against discrimination by the Coroner
- gathering in solidarity with trans Tasmanians outside the Town Hall
Individually, these protests may have upset some people.
But together they served an invaluable purpose: prompting Tasmanians to sit up and think about the discrimination and prejudice their LGBTIQA+ compatriots face. Prejudice often inflicts its harm below the level of public debate, for example hidden by the dry official language of government or during everyday personal interactions.
Protest is an immensely effective way to expose the damage prejudice causes, to discredit it as a way for a society to treat its minorities and to consign it to history. Alongside its siblings, persuasion and persistence, protest puts prejudice to flight.
In Tasmania that is exactly what has happened. We have gone from having the worst laws and attitudes about LGBTIQA+ people to having some of the best.
** We were the last state to decriminalise homosexuality, but the first to move on civil partnerships and same-sex marriage.
*** We were the only state to have laws against cross-dressing but now have the nation’s best anti-discrimination and gender recognition laws.
**** Support among Tasmanians for criminalising homosexuality was higher than the national average in the 90s, but so was our Yes vote for marriage equality in 2017.
Tasmania’s transformation is astonishing and at each point in that transformation protest played a critical role. Put another way, if you believe Tasmania’s transformation has made it a better place, then you must support the right to protest that helped propel this transformation.
From Inaction to Action: Nurturing Journeys in Climate Activism
by Dr. Robyn Gulliver
Robyn Gulliver is an academic, social scientist and activist who researches the activities and impact of the Australian environmental movement – including the precursors and consequences of environmental and pro-democracy collective action and the social psychology of effective activism.
You may have been reading about melting ice caps. A friend might have mentioned another new coal mine opening up. Or perhaps you went with friends to a festival about sustainable living. It may have taken a moment or a span of years, but somehow you – like many before you – took a first step towards activism.
While each activist has a unique trajectory from inaction to action, it mostly begins with a spark; something seen, experienced, or understood, which triggers a desire to act. Injustices become visible, the political becomes personal, and action becomes possible.
Research in social psychology offers insights into what factors may push individuals across this threshold from inaction to action. People are more likely to engage in activism when they identify strongly with a movement, or if they feel a sense of injustice or negative emotion towards the cause. They’re more likely to do something if they believe it will make a difference. People can also become activists by simply tagging along with others. When a person sees themselves as someone who is an activist, or as the type of person who does activism, or is surrounded by people they trust who do activism, suddenly a new world of engagement and empowerment is revealed.
Our connection to others gives us the power to create new activists. Bring friends and family along on the activist journey by sharing your personal story about what motivates you. Take them to events. Help build and share social norms showing that activism is the right thing to do. Show them what activism has achieved in the past.
Psychological combinations of identity, emotion, moral outrage, social norms, and efficacy can create a powerful cocktail that propels someone from passive concern to active participation. Once that threshold is crossed, new activists often find themselves in a heady environment of like-minded individuals. Blockade camps, protests and community meetings become spaces where emotions are heightened, and opinions are strengthened. Activism becomes a collective identity – something earned, shared, and respected among other activists. A sense of solidarity can act as a glue that binds people together in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.
This shared identity and solidarity can be a source of joy and drive that will endure through the inevitable hard times.
Indeed, activists’ trajectories are seldom smooth. The intensity of activism can push people away as well. Sometimes it seems like nothing works. Meanwhile, groups argue. Disputes about the most effective way to preserve a liveable climate split teams apart, while stereotypes about activists may push friends and family away. Activists can also feel isolated and alone. Others don’t seem to grasp the urgency; the fear, the grief, and the pain of watching a world that seems to be collapsing despite our best efforts.
We need to care for and support every activist around us, as we need them more than ever. Having fun and sharing good news stories can help maintain motivation and provide new avenues and ideas for action. Mixing direct action with education and outreach can help activists feel they’re making progress on multiple fronts. Recognising even minor victories can provide the psychological boost needed to continue in the face of setbacks. Saying thank you and recognising individual efforts whenever possible makes people feel valued and appreciated. Acknowledging the emotional toll of activism and prioritising mental health is crucial for long-term sustainability. Regular gatherings, support groups, and social events can reinforce the sense of solidarity and shared purpose.
Every activist has a unique story. These personal narratives – of why individuals chose to act, what keeps them going, and how they’ve grown – are powerful tools for inspiring others. By sharing their journeys, activists can help others see themselves in the movement and, in turn, help them walk that journey from concern to action.
Heroes Not Criminals
By a Cool Cat
What is it like to choose to take ‘direct action’ in so-called Australia today?
For me the desire for direct action is born from a realisation that the multitude of crises bearing down on us are not individual problems that can simply be ‘fixed.’ They can’t be solved through reform or changing policies; but are interconnected, direct and inevitable consequences of the current political and economic systems under which we live. That our participation in ‘democracy’ as a means to determine our collective futures is now reduced to the pathetic right to choose between which elites will rule over us every few years.
It is the realisation that if we seek structural change, we need to set our agenda outside the discourse of those who hold power, outside the framework of what their institutions can do. What this process actually looks varies a whole lot depending on the context it sits in.
I want to describe some of my recent experiences challenging the political and economic systems of ‘Australia’ with the hope to offer a small insight into spaces that are often obscured and somewhat misunderstood, and the ways the state is responding to protect its interests and maintain the status quo. Rather than recounting specific events, I want to sit in the tension that exists in being present to the reality of living in a settler-colonial society, in both the grief of reckoning with its inherently violent nature, and the joy that erupts through the capacity to say no, to refuse and attack the debilitating forms of life offered to us under it. To describe the feeling of realising our ability to physically disrupt the destruction, and resist the systems attempting to render everything on this continent profitable and controllable; and as we do this, holding the common notions of our desired futures and beginning to inhabit the sort of worlds we hope to emerge after this one, catching glimpses of them as we pry
open the cracks we already see forming.
It is important to say that my experience of attempting to challenge the Australian colonial project is a tiny fragment existing in the wider context of the staunch resistance of first nations peoples that has been ongoing since the colonisation of this continent began, and does not represent this history nor the present struggles of these peoples against the colony today. Engaging in direct action is never an end in itself, it is a part of a dynamic process. For me this process of engaging with change in a more intentional way often begins through allowing myself to be more present to the world around me, more connected to the immediate reality I exist in and the people that I share that reality with. In a world that demands constant distraction, deferral and numbness from us, being truly present has the potential to transform our apathy into a desire to act, to turn away from the dull and monotonous forms of life offered up by modernity and begin imagining the possibilities of what our futures can hold.
I recently spent three weeks with a group of people that came together from across the continent to organise and carry-out a campaign of disruption targeting one of the major economic arteries of Australia, the Newcastle coal port. This port that sits on the land of the Awabakal and Worimi people is the largest coal port on the planet. It is fed by a rail network connecting it to the mines spread throughout Wonnarua country, the Hunter Valley region, and is shockingly immense in its scale. Witnessing it feels like you’re seeing the underbelly of our nation, with its true
intentions and primary function laid bare. Its extractive intent manifesting in the form of a constant stream of hulking 10,000tonne coal trains that stretch for over a kilometre long hurtling along the tracks; their rumbling a haunting mantra of economic growth at all costs.
Throughout the campaign we utilised a variety of blockading tactics to exploit the vulnerabilities of key bottlenecks within the rail network and inside the port itself to cause sustained disruption to the operation.
Discovering how acting collectively we were capable of having an impact far greater than what would be imaginable if we tried to act alone. There is joy that arises through taking action in this way. In experiencing an increased capacity to affect and be affected by the world, you begin to feel more alive with the people who surround you.
It emerges in those moments of standing on silent train tracks when the entire operation, thousands of tonnes of machinery and millions of dollars in stolen wealth, has been successfully brought to a complete standstill by a single piece of rope with someone’s fragile body hanging off the end of it. It is born from living, planning and taking these actions grounded in held notions of consent, care and radical trust; notions that in themselves disrupt the domination, coercion and segregation we have become so accustomed to under the status quo.
Alongside this joy, the looming threat of repression also hangs over us, knowing that those who hold power will use it against anything or anyone challenging that power. Targeted surveillance, paramilitary policing, malicious legislation and the weaponization of the so-called justice system are just a few of the ways the Australian system is responding to the disruption we caused. This eventuated in me watching my friends, young people with no criminal history, get months long prison sentences. Deemed criminals for their efforts to try and protect the habitability of this planet, the result of which is tied to all our futures. Then finding myself sitting in courtrooms for my own sentencing.
I did not find anything close to impartial or objective ‘justice.’ I instead was confronted by the ranting of an old man steeped in prejudice, a little dictator drunk on his own power with nobody able to challenge his divine authority to cage anyone he deemed unworthy of freedom.
Whilst the criminalisation of non-violent protest and political expression is scary, experiencing the inherently violent nature of state apparatus like the legal and punitive justice systems firsthand is more bone-chilling. Not because its violence is exceptional, but because it is so normalised, so constantly inflicted on not only people who challenge these systems, but those whose existence merely gets in the way of its operations.
It is equally confronting seeing how the public cry out against its injustice only when the violence is directed at a ‘peaceful protester,’ or someone deemed a ‘good person’ who doesn’t deserve to lose their freedom. Rarely acknowledging the inevitability of violence and injustice in our institutions that have been built off the back of genocide and actively uphold the ongoing colonisation of this continent.
This threat of violence is used by the powerful to instil fear, to immobilise people from acting on their politics and values, to stop them from seeking change beyond the ‘approved avenues,’ and to make us doubt that an entirely different future to the one that has been set out for us, is possible. Whilst these threats are real, when we are able to overcome our fear of their power and of our own powerlessness, I believe it can backfire – as repression increases, so does our capacity to evade it.
- As surveillance becomes evermore pervasive, we learn to cover our identities and the tracking of our movements.
- As the police abuse their powers, we realise who it is they really serve.
- As we get sent to prison, our resolve against its injustices hardens.
- As government institutions become more hostile, we become less dependent on them.
- As the cost of existing bites harder, we discover how we can live with less.
- As this world becomes more precarious, we find stability in the communities we form, and when inevitable crises strike, we are all the more ready with the increased response-ability of our collective capacities, and the colony flails as its rigid institutions of power and wealth begin to crumble under the beautiful and chaotic future that awaits us.
The question that still sits with me is this:
what ways am I able to most effectively leverage my privilege against the current systems of power that gave it to me?… what will the consequences be if I do?… what will be left if I don’t?
We have an entire world to fight for, and our entire lives to fight for it.
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