By Michael Gray Griffith: Café Locked Out.
We set this image up. The day before we had stood before the doors of Parliament with all our flags and banners and t-shirts with messages that all read Freedom. But today we weren’t allowed any closer than the bollards in this image.
We had been told too, the only flag allowed past this point was the blue flag, and that it had to be flown the right way up and we weren’t allowed to have any flag poles. We didn’t know what law they were using, and our tribe was bereft with such rumours that we decided that since the police were there, we’d send this little girl forward, with her father, to see what this police officer would do. The rumour was true.
A few days later, on the Sunday after the great march, a major radio station in Canberra was asking the locals to dob in any vehicle or person displaying our flag, to the police, so that they could come and move them on or arrest them. It was on this day, in our nation’s capitol, that our national flag became the yellow star.
But why do the protesters love the flag when their country has cast them out?
Initially, we called the new system apartheid and segregation, but with segregation there is, as a rule, somewhere for the oppressed to go. We protesters have nowhere. We are the unwanted, the untouchables, the fully or partially unvaccinated, and yet so many of us proudly carry the flag, both the blue and the red versions. Why? Many walk around wearing the flag as a cape. Not that it protects you, for Mary, a grandmother was wearing it that way, the day two police officers shoved her to the ground then pepper sprayed her fallen face, twice.
Here, in the ACT they had new weapons trained upon us, as we sang the national anthem, and listened to more speeches, as our flags flew high over the grass before Parliament house.
Some want a new flag. They want the Union Jack removed. But I feel, from my observations, that our tribe doesn’t see the union jack, or even the stars. The flag instead represents the country we have lost, the one we are here fighting for. To us, it is no longer the National Flag, for those in power have continued to betray all of its values. This flag, both the red and the blue is our flag. The red ensign being the more revolutionary of the two. And they aren’t just flying from our vehicles and our poles, but from the hill we are rigorously defending. The moral high ground.
They know that they can never take this ground, for to hold it you have to live in the truth and their world is constructed of endless layers of lies.
But they want us off, for they know that our courage is infectious. This is why they are not allowing us to work. They are trying to starve us into submission. All over Australia we have been besieged. This was why Epic Camp was so Epic. It was a union of isolated groups and individuals, who had come together, from all over the land, to celebrate and in the great march display to the world, their resilience, their commitment and their power.
This is also why, on the following Monday, after the majority of protesters had gone home, the police invaded Epic Camp in force. They brought their new sonic weapons, they brought dogs and rubber bullets, and they marched through the camp in a long line arresting anyone who refused to move. They wanted to try reclaim the high ground. To show the World who was really in charge. For the rest of the day they did the same in other camps all over the ACT, and then, for the rest of the week they kept trying to move those who had remained, on.
What they didn’t understand was that their actions were empty. It was a lesson they didn’t learn when they evicted us from the grass before the national library.
The moral high ground isn’t below our feet. It’s in our souls, and our hearts. It’s in our DNA.
It’s in the ideas we bounce off each other, as our fired up entrepreneurial spirits search for new ways to add pressure. To hold the line. It’s in the donations for food and camping gear and money, as around the world people reach out to support our cause. It’s in our promise to come back. And we will be back.
Whenever I see a flag now I know that the person flying it is on our side. The side fighting for the right to choose what goes into our body. The one fighting for the freedom to travel, to work, to build a life and pursue happiness. To protect our children.
And it is from this defiance that we draw our hope. For we are fighting from a source of passion, whereas all their side has left to defend their totalitarian narrative with, is this thinning line of police officers, who are fighting for a pay packet and defending what?
A system determined to inoculate their children with a vaccine that is injuring people and worse. A system determined to starve any Australian who chooses to defend freedom, into compliance.
Sadly now their blue gloves, and ear plugs to protect them from the audio weapons, their bullet proof vests, and pepper sprays, and their revolvers, are all empty symbols. A gutted truth. A plastic shadow of a real uniform once worn by past heroes, but now worn by those betraying everything that was great about our country. A betrayal never so acute as together, with all their toys of oppression, they hunted the Nation’s capitol for anyone flying our Nation’s flag.
Fortunately for them, their new masters have given them all something to hide their growing and irremovable shame behind. A facemask.
“The times create”, as the old saying goes.
Through sheer persistence, determination and a profound sense of injustice Michael Gray Griffith and his team at Café Locked Out have become some of Australia’s most significant documenters of the Freedom Movement.
You can read more of Michael’s work here.
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