Ever been to a 'protestival'?

People’s Blockade 2024: photo sourced from Rising Tide Facebook feed

An antidote to climate anxiety

People I admire tell me that action is the antidote to anxiety, so this year I signed up to join the Rising Tide ‘protestival’, centred on the world’s largest coal exporting port, just a couple of hours north of Sydney, at Newcastle.

I started by attending a screening of the film about last year’s blockade, The First Wave, when over 100 people got arrested including a 97-year-old Uniting Church Minister, the Reverend Alan Stuart. You can watch Alan’s arrest to cheers from his supporters here. It brought tears to my eyes to see a pretty fragile old man being assisted out of a boat and escorted away by a police officer.

In an opinion piece written after his arrest the Reverend explained his decision:

I did this for my grandchildren. I did this because I was inspired by my two granddaughters, Jasmine and Alexa, who are working so hard to address the climate crisis we face. I have been so proud watching both girls try so hard to get their voices heard for so many years. They’ve signed petitions, written letters, organised rallies, visited politicians, and educated the community … They have tried asking nicely, and their voices have continued to be ignored by our government. And then, in the past year, I have watched both my granddaughters get arrested for climate protests. It was hard to watch. I was scared for their safety and I wished they didn’t have to do it.

The Rising Tide doco on the 2023 protestival is below - you just need to find 20 minutes to get a feeling for what a ‘People’s Blockade’ is all about.

When I attended a screening of The First Wave, I asked if Rising Tide had invented the word ‘protestival’. I hadn’t come across it before, although of course I can hear what is going on in this new word. When you use a festival as a mechanism for a protest, well that’s a ’protestival’.

The word is not popular enough to have found its way into any major dictionary - not the Oxford English Dictionary, or the Macquarie Dictionary. The word was submitted to the Collins Dictionary in 2013, and the dictionary team say they are monitoring this word for ‘evidence of usage’. The Urban Dictionary of course has an entry.

On the question of whether Rising Tide had coined the word ‘protestival’, Nigel on behalf of Rising Tide answered my question with an air of faux authority: ‘Can you write “According to Nigel, we invented this new word”’. According to Nigel, Rising Tide invented this word.

From the Rising Tide Facebook feed, 24/11/24

But I’ve been doing my research, and while this is not quite true, Rising Tide could add to their current list of aims - 1. no new fossil fuel extraction projects, 2. tax fossil fuel exports at 78% to fund the energy transition and pay for climate loss and damage, and 3. end all coal exports from Newcastle by 2030 - one more: 4. make the word ‘protestival’ so popular it has to enter into our dictionaries.

Protestival in the news

With such a low frequency word, there’s not much data around. What the very large corpus of news data shows is that the term was around in the early 2010s being applied to the Seattle ‘hempfest’, then the world’s largest gathering of ‘marijuana lovers’. The hempfest’s executive director - an organization devoted to celebrating and legalizing marijuana has an executive director? - has written a history of the hempfest, using Protestival as its title.

The word puddled along for a few years inside cannibus culture, before breaking out into the climate protest space in 2021. Here’s an article from the Illawarra Mercury - a newspaper aimed at residents in the Wollongong area south of Sydney - on a climate gathering organized by Extinction Rebellion. In 2022, The Argus, a local Brighton newspaper, used ‘protestival’ to report on the annual Brighton Naked Bike Ride. I couldn’t find any copyrightable photos of this event, but you can google it and find them yourselves. According to The Argus, the naked bike ride is designed to:

empower participants in a celebration of car-free, human-powered travel, while also protesting against climate change and highlighting the vulnerability of cyclists and their strength and safety in numbers.

More people having fun while protesting.

Finally, in 2024 we start to see ‘protestival’ turning up in the news reporting on the People’s Blockade in Newcastle - I expect to see a bit more data rolling into this space over the next couple of weeks, and hopefully beyond.

Protestivaling in recent history

There are a couple of academic papers on the concept, which see the idea as part of a longer tradition than North American dope smoking gatherings. For instance, there’s an article published in 2008 titled ‘Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnivalized Politics in the Present’ by cultural anthropologist specializing in transformational events and movements, Dr Graham St John. St John argues that the combining of elements of festival with direct action protest go back at least to the late 1950s. In his history, St John traces this combination back to early anti-nuclear demonstrations, such as those by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches to Britain’s nuclear weapons research facility at Aldermaston in the lat 1950s, to the Greenham Common peace camp in Berkshire as well as the peace camp in Seneca in New York State. These camps were places where

women made spectacular vigil upon the military industrial apparatus, their often uncovered bodies forming an abject contrast to the phallic nuclear missiles harboured behind the wire. 

The protestival, St John argues is a ‘polyvalent tactic’ -  one that delivers many effects. Quoting work from Stam, published in Postmodernism and its Discontents in 1988, St John argues the current of festival-ness interwoven with direct action is very powerful:

while constituting ‘a demystifiying instrument for everything in the social formation that renders collectivity impossible: class hierarchy, sexual repression, patriarchy, dogmatism and paranoia’, carnival is simultaneously ‘ecstatic collectivity, the joyful affirmation of social change, a dress rehearsal for utopia’.

Friday night music at the 2024 People’s Blockade and Protestival

In summary, a protestival is a mode of organising with lots of strings to its bow, bringing joy and celebration together with aesthetic forms of protest designed to catch media and social media attention, so vital to changing our fossil fueled dominant narrative.

St John goes on to claim that the originator of the term was a Sydney activist named John Jacobs whose history is in anarchistic and artistic projects in Sydney, such as the Vibe Tribe. St John’s source is ‘personal communication’, meaning that it was Jacobs himself who told St John he’d made up this word. That’s as far as I have been able to uncover the origins of this term.

Ordinary people called by extraordinary times

So, with apologies to Nigel, Rising Tide didn’t invent the word ‘protestival’. But with over 100 people again arrested at this year’s blockade, including an 84 year old great grandmother, chances are that Rising Tide will be the catalyst that brings the term out into common parlance. One of the things in its favour is that Rising Tide is a cross-generational group - alongside the great grandma, a 16 year old was also arrested. And here’s a 12 year speaking out prior to the protestival when the NSW government tried to stop it going ahead by declaring an ‘exclusion zone’ for four days around the shipping channel, a decision soon after overturned by the NSW Supreme Court.

This young climate defender describes the government she is 6 years too young to have voted for as ‘throwing a tantrum’. It would be such a relief if more politicians could be the adults in the climate crisis. It is so hard watching so many young people having to step up to defend their futures.

Rising Tide describes itself in very simple terms:

We are the rising tide of ordinary people, called by extraordinary times. We are a diverse movement demanding Australia honours our commitment to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. We are prepared to take whatever peaceful actions are within our power to defend the climate.

That’s what I saw when I was there - so many ordinary people, as diverse as the fans at a Taylor Swift concert, responding to the call of these times. And I can barely explain how it felt to be on that beach, watching the colourful kayaks bobbing around on a choppy ocean, while a frighteningly enormous ship full of dirty and planet destroying coal motored its way from Australia’s shores.

As one coal ship steamed past the many climate defenders out on the water, I suddenly noticed a clan in red in a gesture towards this deathly cargo that seemed to me to embody both anger and grief. It was my first encounter with the red rebels from Extinction Rebellion.

I didn’t feel game enough to paddle out, so I signed up to be part of the crew washing up for the crew cooking and feeding the many activists and volunteers - in their hundreds and hundreds. Below is the line of breakfast bowls for Saturday morning’s brekky, which was delicious. I have cooked for large groups before, but nothing over about 30. I stood in awe of the cooks on duty, who had planned meals, shopped, organized huge pots and pans and tubs, manifold chopping boards and graters, long paddles for stirring hot pots cooking away. It felt so great to be washing up for these kitchen geniuses. As I popped in my notes feed a couple of days ago, it was the most therapeutic thing I’ve done since Trump was re-elected.

If you want to be ‘at the coalface’ of the climate fight, book your calendar for next year’s protestival. Please join and support Rising Tide. Currently their mech is ALL SOLD OUT - but you can still click on the donate button.