RTS 7 - Reclaim the Streets
I’ve had a lot of fun making videos over the years. (I’ve also been bashed, detained, arrested, had cameras broken and caught malaria) but it’s been a hoot most of the time.
No time was more fun than the 7th Reclaim the streets in Sydney, which I think took place at the above date. It remains my favorite doco still. I think I’ve made better quality doco’s since, but none have been so much fun.
The event was a huge success. What was supposed to be a 10 minute symbolic occupation of the eastern distributor toll plaza became a traffic standstill for a lot of Sydney traffic. The fact that my footage made lead story on every Sunday night TV news (except the ever more conservative ABC) gave me some great satisfaction.
Although the news focussed mostly on the police incompetence and over aggressiveness, they did not paint too bad a picture of us. They couldn’t really. We were all just having a good time.
Global Warming was still just a distant concept to most of us at this point in time, but by protesting about over use of the motor car we were obviously on the right track. September 11 was just another day on the calendar.
Friday, 19 March 1999
RTS 7 - Reclaim the Streets
Some background to RTS
Reclaim the streets began in London in the 90’s. People pissed off at too many roads decided to put on a party as a way of reclaiming some space from the almighty motor car.
It spread through the UK and through the world. As a global movement it has had much to do with the spread of the big pro democracy protests that have ricocheted around the world in recent years. I remember at one RTS meeting the excitement of a friend who had just returned from London.
The movement was so big there, he explained, that the goal of the Reclaim the Streets had shifted to take in a somewhat broader agenda. The movement, he explained, had decided to take on global capital.
Part of the influence for this shift in focus were the actions of people in the majority world like the Zapatistas in Mexico and the landless peoples Movement of Brazil.
The spread of grass-roots globalization was off and running. Before too much longer people I had known from Reclaim the Streets rallies in Melbourne and Sydney were popping up in front of my camera in all sorts of other places too, like S11 protests in Melbourne. In Seattle, Genoa, Washington, London and seemingly evey other place in the world people were taking on the excess of global capital.
Reclaim the Streets was, of course not the only factor in the growth of the movement of movements, but the international networks it had created played an important part.
RTS 7 was originally titled Violence is Violence, but it was a title i never liked. The title was a play on statement made by Dave Darcy of the NSW police to the media where he claimed that ‘silence was violence’.
By this he meant that activists who would not tell the police of their intended action, as the RTS collective had decided, were being violent. He later retracted the statement.
I changed the title later, and re-cut the intro sequence because I didn’t like the word ‘violence’ sitting out the front of a RTS story.
I’ve worked for years as a part time nurse in a hospital that deals with most of Victoria’s major road traumas, and have seen time and time again the violence that is the motor car.
A street as a place for partying in is a much more sensible idea. : )
