Sorrento

Because this is our last week together, the five of us Urban Seed residents decided to go away together for the weekend one last time. So Saturday night we drove the van down to Nomes' family's holiday house down at Sorrento.
After we'd unpacked the van we had some wine with Nomes' parents, and then we went and had tea at this Greek restaurant where they had a blow-up Santa.

After we'd had tea we went to the Sorrento Hotel, which was pretty noisy and crowded. On the way there these girls asked Ali to sing them a song. (One of them was having her hen's night, and it was a dare.)
When I went to use the toilet this really drunk guy who was also there said, 'Hey, what's in yer backpack?' There wasn't much in there except my Bible, so I said, 'My Bible.' I'm not sure if he understood what I'd said, but he said, 'Ya got any happiness in ya backpack?' I said, 'Yeah, lots of happiness in there.' He said, 'Can I 'ave some?' I said, 'Actually, I was just bluffing,' and then I exited, as I'd finished drying my hands.
We didn't stay there very long because the place closed at 11.
When we got back to the house we had some wine out on the balcony and played with Shadow, Nomes' family's talking dog.
This morning (Sunday morning) we had breakfast pretty late and spent a fair bit of time discussing theology with Nomes' parentds, and then went down to the back beach for a while.

Me and Ray waded in the rockpools a bit, looking at the the limpets and anemones and other weird little sea creatures, and talking about the Christmas break. We found this weird little red creature that looked a bit like an underwater spider with waving legs. Then we went and lay on the sand with Nathan and Nomes, while Ali was away meditating. When Ali came back we went for a walk along the beach, and I got knocked over by a big wave.
After lunch we went to this cafe at the front beach and had coffee and played cards.

For tea we had fish and chips (except me and Ray had vegeburgers) with Nomes' family, and Nathan played some of the songs we sing before lunch at Credo ('John and Jesus', 'Irish Blessing', Kelsey's song (I can't remember what it's actually called)) and we we sang them together.
After tea we packed up our stuff and talked with Nomes' dad about nuclear energy and nuclear waste and nuclear weapons (he's a radiation scientist), and we thanked Nomes' parents for their hospitality, and headed off.
Before we left Sorrento we went to this really nice place to watch the sun go down.

I can't remember what the place was called though! We just sat there for ages watching the sun go down. I was feeling pretty sad thinking that Nathan and Ali will be moving out soon, and while the sun was disappearing I just said, 'Yous are my big brothers and sisters!' (This may mean that I've unintentionally adopted them into the Brooks family.) Nathan said, 'You're my annoying little brother!'
We got back here at about 11:30. EcoPaul was sitting at the door writing a letter, so I got him to take a picture of us.

Christmas cooking

In Credo this afternoon we did a whole heap of cooking, for presents to give people at the Credo Christmas party next Thursday.

Father Abraham had many sons...

This morning I went to the appeal of the Islamic Council of Victoria versus Catch the Fire Ministries case. (This was the first case based on the Religious and Racial Tolerance Act 2001.) The ICV was saying that Danny Naliah and Danny Scot from Catch the Fire had been saying at a conference in 2002 that the Islamic community is trying to take over the country, that they are in control of immigration, that they are demons and that they make money from illicit drugs. They were also saying that the Q'uran promotes violence and that terrorists are true Muslims. In 2004 the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal decided that they had breached the Religious and Racial Tolerance Act. Today the appeal was accepted, so the case is going to be sent back to VCAT.
I think it's really tragic that Christians and Muslims have been unable to resolve this conflict outside of court. I hope that we can find more of the things to unite us rather than divide us.

Media coverage:
'Court orders vilification retrial' - The Age
'Church race case back to tribunal' - Herald Sun

Mini golf

Yesterday as a break-up activity for Credo team (the volunteers and satff who run Credo), we went out to Dingley to play mini golf.

On the way home we got sideswiped by a truck. Luckily everyone was okay.

advoc8

As of today I'm blogging at advoc8 as well as here.
(advoc8 is Tear Australia's site for youth and young adults.)

Rusk continues

This afternoon we played Rusk, using the board we made on Wednesday, four packets of jelly babies and five dice.

First we placed neutral armies (the purple jelly babies) on various strategic territories (eg. The Country Everybody Wants, Credo, Central Island). We divided the remaining territories by each taking it in turns to put one of our jelly baby armies on a territory, until each territory had one army. Then we each placed another ten armies on some of the territories we'd chosen.

We decided that at the beginning of each turn, each player would get two extra armies if they had taken over someone else's territory the previous turn, plus one army for each territory they were occupying. As well as that you could get extra armies if in the previous turn you had taken over one of the strategic territories I mentioned earlier, and managed to keep it.
Attacking and defending was the same as in Risk.

Dumpster diving

Saturday night I went dumpster diving with Barry, Ash, Ross and Pete. Barry, Ash and Ross do it all the time, and get pretty much everything they eat from dumpster diving. They basically took us on a tour of the inner northern suburbs, in the van that they live in. Barry was saying it was like being in Bangladesh, because the sky was grey from the bushfires, but the sun was so bright and hot.

The bin at the first place we went to was full of cases of pancake mix. I didn't really want any, because if I was going to make pancakes I'd prefer make them myself out of normal ingredients, rather than using a mixture that's full of preservatives and artificial flavours and stuff, but the guys insisted that I had to take some.
There wasn't any food in the next dumpster we went to, but there were an awful lot of books. I grabbed a heap of hardcover books with Korean writing on them, because I use hardcover books for making journals and sketchbooks to give to people. Also got a paperback copy of Catch 22.
Next we went to a bakery. There was a whole dumpster full of stale bread.

At the next surpermarket we went to, the dumpsters were locked, but they're pretty experienced at opening dumpsters, so we get a whole heap of lamb cutlets, lamb chops, beef steaks and kangaroo, as well as some capsicums and really big bag of pizza bread. While we were getting stuff out of the dumpster a guy and a girl came up to us because they were looking for food as well, so we said that we'd take it back to the van and divide it with them.

We all went to another supermarket across the road and it was unbeliveable how much good food they'd thrown out there. There was a watermelon, three jackfruit, heaps of potatoes, eggplant... We had to put it all in a shopping trolley.

After that we took all the stuff back to the house of the people we met, and divided up what we'd gotten, and ate the watermelon and a sponge cake with them and their housemates. We hung around there for a fair while talking about the ethics of consumption, and when we left one of them gave us a big bag of organic lemons from his mum's lemon tree.
When I got back home with my share of the food, I actually chucked a fair bit of it out again. The others had insisted that I take a whole heap of the pizza bread, and hadn't really gotten that I wouldn't be able to eat it because it's so oily and would make me feel sick. So I had to chuck that out. There was so basil, which still had roots, so I planted that in the herb garden. And there were three capsicums and ten potatoes, which I washed, and will probably cook tomorrow. And there's a loaf of sourdough bread, which I've been using.
I admire that freegans are using a whole heap of stuff that would otherwise be wasted, but I'm not sure that freeganism offers much of a long-term solution to the problem of how much food gets wasted. I think it's good that people are choosing to try and participate as little as they can in the corrupt economy (corrupt because if something isn't sold it's disposed of), but by living off the waste people are still dependant of that corruption. I think it'd probably be better for people to be using freegan tactics, but also growing their own food or consuming responsibly (eg. local and organic products).
But that's just what I reckon. What about you?

Rusk

Last year, when Luke was living here, he and one of his friends decided they wanted to play Risk. However, they went to a shop and discovered it cost about $100 for a Risk set, so they ended up inventing the wonderful (and cheap) game of Rusk.
Today after lunch we created a new Rusk board, with Ben, Jase, Dave and Cara:

According to Luke, it's actually more fun making a Rusk board than actually playing it, and by once you've finished the map there's not usually much time left to play anyway. Once we'd finished the map, and worked out what the rules should be, we'd run out of time. So we're going to play on Monday.

A Scanner Darkly

Went to see A Scanner Darkly this afternoon. It's an adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's novel of the same name, filmed and then digitally converted into animation. (The director, Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, School of Rock) used the same technique in Waking Life, which I wrote a fair bit about last year.)
The film set 16 years into the future, where America's War on Drugs and War on Terror have become pretty much the same thing. The protagonsit is Bob Arctor (played by Keanu Reeves), an undercover police officer who is supposed to be spying on his drug addict household, and ends up becoming an addict himself. The drug he is using, Substance D, causes the part of him that is the spy and that part of him that is the user to split, and he ends up spying on himself.
There's trailers here (Windows Media Player) and here (Quicktime), and you can watch the first twenty-three minutes for free here.

Isolate yourself

Saw this on the way back from the market this morning. Reminded me of a discussion I was involved in recently, where someone was talking about her brother being given a portable DVD player for Christmas, and how that encouraged him to spend less time with other people.
It's going pretty crazy in the city now, because it's getting close to Christmas. There's fake stars everywhere. (You often can't see the real ones around here at night, because of air and light pollution.)

Noticed that some of the Christmas advertising is encouraging isolation too:

What happened during the G20 - day 3

I got back to the embassy after the concert at about twelve thirty. There wasn't really any space left for me to lie down and go to sleep, so I just sat against the barricade. Ben turned up on his rollerblades, with two containers of rice that he'd cooked for us.
I ended up not actually sleeping, because there were so many people out.
Not long after I got there this drunk guy ran up to the barricade and started to climb over, and then jumped back down, and continued walking past, yelled a heap of abuse at us, and then got grabbed by the police and put in the back of a truck.
Another drunk guy came up to us, who I recognised from the U2 concert. He'd been standing just in front of us.
I said, 'Hey you were at the U2 show tonight, weren't ya? What'd you think?'
He said, 'Yeah, was good. Get a job ya f***in' hippy. Pay some tax.'
I told him that I already had a job and paid tax, but he was wandering off again.
We had a lot of people tell us to get jobs. Was talking to Ben about how it seemed as though people presumed that because you do something you strongly believe needs to be done, people presume that you're only doing it because you don't have a paid job, and therefore just don't have anything better to occupy your time. Also found it interesting that people think it's fine to abuse people that they believe to be unemployed.
We also had a lot of people come up to us because they genuinely wanted to talk to use and find out about why we were protesting. We had two Catholic students come up to us and say that we should've advertised what we were doing at the unis, because would've liked to have been involved. They asked wat I thought of Oscar Romero and liberation theology, and I said I didn't know much about Oscar Romero other than that he was assassinated by the Salvadoran government, but that I'd read a bit of Gustavo Guiterrez and liked what he had to say.
There were three Israeli backpackers who wanted to know where the protests had been, and whether there were any protests planned for Sunday. They asked if I was a student, and I said that I wasn't, and they asked what I did. I said that I did cleaning and I cooked food with people and did art with people and hung out with people, and explained what Credo and Urban Seed are like. Before they left one of them said, 'Isn't it great that two Jews and Muslim and a Christian can hang out and have a decent, civilised discussion?' Reminded me of the 'COEXIST' bandana that Bono used as a blindfold during 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'.
There was a couple who came up to us to ask us why we were protesting, because they didn't know very much about the G20 and wanted to find out a bit about it. I explained that the G20 was started after certain Asian and Latin American economies crashed in the '90s, so that the G8 countried could try to stablise the 'developing' economies that they depend on on for cheap resources and labour, so that their own economies would be safe as well. They said that they'd heard that the G20 were trying to alleviate poverty getting 'developing' countries to open up to foreign developers. This often means that people make more money, but also need more money. They go from having a subsistence economy, where they can produce everything they need themselves, or buy it locally, to being part of a global economy, where they are just producing masses and masses of the one item, and having to import everything else from far away. This is particularly a problem if they're producing a luxury item like coffee or tobacco. The fact that everything is produced a long way away also makes it a lot easier for companies to charge a lot more for a product than it costs them to produce the product.
Someone had a guitar, so Ben was playing it for a while, and one of the police asked if he took requests (they would've been pretty bored standing there all night), and he explained that he couldn't actually play any songs, he just made stuff up as he was going. And then he skated around in front of the barricade playing the guitar.
Later on we had a guy come to talk to us because he was offended that we had a cross and icons out in the street. For a long time he just kept saying, 'I'm mortally offended! How dare you? How dare you?' He eventually explained that he was offended because the cross and icons weren't made by someone who'd been ordained by the Roman Catholic Church. He also reckoned that you shouldn't mix religion and economics. There was another guy hanging around at that time who was a Pentecostal, and said that he could understand why he was offended, because he reckoned we looked like a cult, because we had a cross and icons, and some of us had been lighting candles earlier in the evening, to symbolise prayers.

He also reckoned we might be a cult because we looked like hippies. He said that he used to care about the environment and social justice too, but that was before he became a Christian. He said that now all that mattered was saving people's souls from Hell. He reckoned that we shouldn't protest, because converting people was more important. He reckoned we should just pray that God will change things. The Catholic guy also reckoned I wasn't a real Christian because I hadn't been baptised as a child.
At about five o'clock Ash woke up, and we watched the sun come up at five thirty. Then I went home to sleep for a few hours.
I didn't wake up until twelve. While I was asleep the police took the Credo cross away from the embassy, because they reckoned it could've been used as a missile. I think they underestimated how heavy it was, and how difficult a missile it would be to launch, because they gave it back again once they'd had enough of it.

(This is the same cross that Brent, Cookie and Jono stood with between the protesters and the mounted police during the World Economic Forum in 2000.)

When I got back to the embassy one of the protesters who'd been chanting the day before was there again, and some of the others from the embassy were chanting with him. There were also two elderly English ladies holding signs. We ended up having a discussion about the chanting, and decided to stop the chanting, because not all of us agreed with the chants, it didn't seem very peaceful, the police seemed fairly tense, and we'd found just being present and talking to people had been more productive.
We wrote a letter about why we were protesting, and when Peter Costello came down to the barricade to shake hands with the police (it was all set up for TV) we asked if he'd take it, but he ignored us. I suppose we weren't in his script.
At five o'clock I went up to the Baptist Church for their G20 church service, but I wasn't in there very long, because they guy running the service mentioned this guy called Simon who'd come in, asking for a Bible to read to the police, so I went out to see what he was doing. He was sitting on the trams tracks, against the Collins Street barricade, and screaming. I asked him what he was doing and he said he'd just arrived that day from the Gold Coast, and it'd taken him seven days to hitch to Melbourne, and he wanted me to scream at the police with him. I said I wasn't really into yelling at the cops, and told him about what we'd been doing at the embassy, and he said he'd come and join us later, if he could find us.
After the church service I went back to the embassy, and we ended the vigil with a shared meal. A lot of it was freegan stuff that the Jesus Christians had gathered.

We celebrated the eucharist using chocolate bars that the police had given us, and some cask wine. Afterwards with passed the peace with each other, the police and other activists who were still around.

I think that our public action was quite successful, in that we were able to have a good relationship with the police and with other protesters. I think we gained a lot of respect from other protesters (who are generally not too fond of Christians), particularly because we were there from Friday morning till Sunday evening. I think we were also able to get our message across fairly clearly, through the media and through direct conversations with people. Because we started on Friday we were able to actually talk about why we were protesting, which was good, because by lunchtime on Saturday all the mass media was interested in was violence.

Here's some of the media coverage we got:
'Christian pacifists demand tickets to G20' - Melbourne Indymedia
'Costello snubs Christian activists' - Melbourne Indymedia
'Christian protestors moved by police' - Melbourne Indymedia
'g20 vigil busted and moved' - Melbourne Indymedia
'Christian group in G20 tent vigil' - The Australian
'Christians, cheerleaders and lots of barricades' - The Age
'Christians kick off G20 protest' - Sydney Morning Herald
'Protesters pray ahead of G20 summit in Melbourne' - Reuters
'Protesters pray ahead of G20 summit in Melbourne' - oneindia
'JIHAD20' - Tim Blair
' 墨爾本: 廿國集團峰會墨市用鐵馬陣' - Singtao
'G20 Christians protest' - Herald Sun
'G20 Radical Christian response' - Crowlie
'More on the G20 Melbourne Christian collective' - Crowlie

Credo Lions vs Sacred Heart

Instead of having lunch in Credo yesterday, we decided to go to Edinburgh Gardens in Fitzroy, and watch our cricket team play against Sacred Heart, and have a barbeque there. Sacred Heart are supposed to be Credo's archrivals, and this time they beat us.

Jackson took these:


(Sorry I haven't finished the G20 stuff yet. Been having malware problems. Hopefully will be able to finish it today.)

What happened during the G20 - day 2

Saturday morning I found the embassy right at the bottom of Russell Street, which was where all of the cars and buses and police where entering and exiting the blockaded area.

This guy called Lorian turned up, and said that he'd heard about what we were doing and wanted to join us. A couple of other protesters came and stood on the traffic island, chanting at the cars and buses that went through the gate:

Globalise justice! Not exploitation!
Globalise peace! Not war!
Globalise happiness! Not suffering!
Fair trade! Not free trade!
Power! Corrupts!
Absolute power! Corrupts absolutely!
Power to the people! Not the corporations!

We had a film with photos on it from when the police made us move, so I took it up to a newsagent in Swanston Street to get it developed. Went up to the State Library, where the march was supposed to be starting at twelve, to see what was going on. There were an awful lot of people selling Green Left and handing out flyers and stuff, which I normally find fairly irritating, so I didn't stay all that long. On the way back to the embassy, when I came to the Collins/Swanston Street intersection, there were about a hundred protesters in white suits coming down from the east end of Collins Street, and a whole heap of mounted police and riot police coming out from behind the barricades, which the protesters had managed to break through.
When I got back to the embassy, almost everyone had gone up to the State Library to join the march.

During the march Simon called us and said that the march had split up, and that it seemed like some people wanted to act violently. The officer in charge at the barricade told the officers to stake out their batons, and said something about people throwing missiles, and about driving people back to Exhibition Street.
My brother Adam turned up, because we were going to be seeing U2 in the evening. We went and checked out the Make Poverty History festival down at Alexandra Gardens. Was a bit bothered by the fact that Mount Franklin had a stall where they were selling water at $2 a bottle. I was bothered because one of the causes of poverty is companies trying to turn eveything into a commodity (eg. water, public space, communication, relationships) that has to be bought and sold.
After a while we went back to the embassy.
Late in the afternoon me and Adam and Gin decided to walk around the block and see what was going on everywhere else. (The protest was quite peaceful where we were, but Simon reckoned it didn't look good in some other places.) We had a look down Flinders Lane, and the vibe there wasn't very good at all. There was a lot of broken glass and masonry on the ground, and there were people throwing stuff in the air. (Some people reckon the glass and masonry was a set-up.) There wasn't a lot of yelling, but there were a lot of people belting out a drum beat. Apart from all the protesters against the barricade, the place was almost completely deserted, and there was no traffic. Seemed really weird, like we were in an urban warzone or something. Apparently the protesters had managed to get through the first row of barricades, and had been right up against the police, who'd driven them back with their batons. Further north, a whole heap of people had gathered in the middle of the Collins/Exhibition Street intersection, and were mostly just sitting around chatting, or playing drums, or dancing. There were a few people running around with hankerchiefs over their mouths, which seemed really irresponsible, as though they were just trying to frighten people.
After we'd finished walking round the six blocks that had been joined together by the barricades, we went to the ecumenical church service at St Paul's Cathedral. The Archbishop of Capetown, who'd visited our embassy the previous day, spoke. I was quite impressed, because he actually said that Westerners need to change the way they live, and not just ask politicians to change everything. I haven't heard anyone else from Make Poverty History point out that we need to make affluence history.
After the service we went to the U2 concert. It was kind of interesting listening to some of their lyrics after what had gone over the last two days:

I was on the outside
When they pulled the four walls down
You looked over the rubble
I was lost
I am found
('I Will Follow')