Student Media Report from the ICC Weapons Blockade

What you’re about to read is five articles explaining what happened at the November 4th Indo-Pacific International Maritime Exposition Blockade protest from the perspective of five student journalists who were in the crowd documenting it. At this blockade, protesters, medics and journalists alike were pepper-sprayed, brutalised and set upon by police in ways that have rarely been seen at a Sydney city protest in our generation. The choice of the New South Wales government and police to sanction and protect the ability of warmongers to freely show off and sell their weapons off the back of the genocides they fuel, while setting upon the students and public who peacefully mobilised against it with extreme force, is something we unilaterally condemn. To those who were at the protest: you were so brave to show up for what you believe in and not back down, even in the face of danger. Being a victim of police brutality is an extreme trauma that no one should have to face, so please take care of yourself and make sure you seek help if what you faced that day is lingering. There are links to support services at the start of this article if you need them. Honi Soit, Noise@UNSW, The Tert and Vertigo uphold that the ability to protest is a right that should never be stripped away and condemn all acts of violence against the people of this country fighting to mobilise themselves for what is right.

Aleksandar Sekulovski, The Tert (University of Wollongong)

The night before the blockade, I stayed with a group of friends up in Sydney. Though we were few in number, we were more than happy to join our comrades at the demonstration against warmongers the next day.

As I struggled to drag myself out of bed, my friends from Wollongong had already been up since the ass-crack of dawn to take the train all the way up to Sydney. As I was taking the bus to Town Hall, my friends from Wollongong had already met with their contingent and started marching in a crowd to the designated meeting place for protesters of the conference.

My friends and I saw them and ran to catch up, while cops dropped their lattes and got into position to harass us.

“They saw us, and then they immediately dropped everything and just started following us,” recalled Ryan Chapman, a General Representative of Wollongong Undergraduate Student Association (WUSA).

“They tried to stop [us] a couple hundred meters from IMAX.

“That’s when they started pushing and shoving and throwing punches.”

I locked arms with comrades and a friend, as others did the same, so we could hold the line against the riot squad. They charged at us several times and continued to shove us further away from our meeting place, all in an effort to herd us into a fenced-off pen in Tumbalong Park where they could control us more easily.

There in that pen, speeches began from various spokespeople and demonstrators, decrying the conference of war criminals and the cops who were complicit in protecting it.

Here I found my fellow student journalists, Imogen Sabey and Max Richter-Weinstein, who were more prepared than I to document everything going on (unfortunately, my phone had been long dead since last night, so I left it in my car before coming to the protest).

The crowd ended up moving to the fence closest to the ICC to come face to face with the cops defending the merchants of death who pay their bonuses. Side by side with my comrade, Ryan Chapman, we locked arms and held the line against the cops again.

It was there that a cop stomped on my foot with his steel-toed boots and laughed in my face. It was there that a cop couldn’t look me in the eyes as I asked him how big a bonus he was being paid to protect a bunch of arms dealers, and it was there that the pepper spray was released.

A few metres from me, another comrade of mine was about to be whisked away.

“As I was holding the line with many comrades in the front, a cop yelled out ‘go get this one!’ and I didn’t realise he meant me,” Tidus Funaki, WUSA’s Ethno-Cultural Representative, recounted.

“They ended up jumping the fence and dragging me and a couple of my comrades.

“They [put] me in a wrist-lock and drag[ged] me out of the protest.”

As this was going down, Ryan and I had to get out of the way before we got hit with more spray. He ended up shielding me from a lot of it as we ran towards the centre of the pen, towards a group of medics who had saline ready to clean out the eyes of anyone affected.

I was lucky enough to only be hit on my neck and hands, but Ryan wasn’t so lucky. He had to sit with the nurse for a while. I was beginning to worry about all my comrades and friends.

Alexander Thorning, the WUSA Education Officer, had been hurt the most. He’d suffered injuries to his leg as well as pepper spray directly in his eyes.

All of my Sydney friends had copped an eyeful, so I sat with them and helped apply saline wherever I could.

In all the chaos, we had also been separated from Imogen, so Max and I set out to find her. She had eventually found her way to where our group was staying to recover, in the shade of the stage, and here we planned to take our leave after suffering a great deal of pain.

While this was going on, Tidus had been arrested and taken to Surry Hills police station, where a majority of the arrestees ended up.

“We were shoved into a small police car, you have to crouch to get inside of it and I’m quite tall so it wasn’t quite fun,” said Tidus.

“The cells they take you into are basically three concrete walls and one glass door, and these are very tiny.

“These are basically designed to dehumanise and isolate you.”

He was held for a few hours before being released and allowed to leave, and in that time, my friends and I had been recovering and cleaning off the pepper spray that stained our clothes and skin.

There must’ve been quite a bit of capsaicin in my hair as it ran down the rest of my body, in what had to be the most painful shower of my life.

Imogen Sabey, Honi Soit (University of Sydney)

When I found the contingent, the first thing I saw was the horses. There were about half a dozen police on horseback looming over the protesters, and it was clearly getting quite violent. The crowd was being pushed around, the police were fencing them in, and it looked like a highly dangerous situation to be walking into. I’d arrived at 6:30, which was the advertised start time, so I was confused as to why the police were already being so violent towards protesters. 

Several people had been pushed to the ground with their faces against the floor, and some people who were being arrested for alleged offences I hadn’t witnessed refused to stand up. I didn’t personally see the use of pepper spray at that point, but as the crowd moved into Tumbalong Park and there was a gap for me to get between the police, I found my friends who told me that the police had started using pepper spray. While the organisers were speaking, things remained tense but mostly calm. 

I was very close to the front when the tension started ratcheting up; I could have touched the barricades as people were rocking them back and forth. The crowd was moving like a single organism, and everyone was pushing on everyone else’s backs. That was the last thing I remember before the police unleashed a cloud of pepper spray on everyone, and people instantly dispersed. Some were pushed over in the chaos; I fled on instinct. I didn’t feel anything for about five seconds, and then it started to burn. By the time I’d stumbled out of the crowd and fallen to my knees, I couldn’t open my eyes. I was effectively running blind, with no sense of direction other than away from the police. 

Seconds later, there were voices around me, patting me on the shoulder and telling me not to panic. They were strangers who weren’t hit so badly by the spray. They weren’t able to do much for a few minutes while I waited out the burning; they coaxed me to open my eyes and it was physically impossible to overcome the pain. There were tears streaming down my face uncontrollably. One of them administered saline water as I gradually tried to open my eyes, although it was even more painful to have my eyes open than it was to have them shut. The saline water poured onto my shirt, but pressing the cool, damp cloth against my eyes turned out to be the best way to safely open them. 

I couldn’t tell where my friends were. I was also acutely aware of my job to report; I’d been posting live updates before I got sprayed, and I needed to get footage of the aftermath. I handed my phone to someone who filmed me and then some of the other injured protesters. The group of people against the barricades had significantly reduced. My eyes still hurt, and my face was like someone had slathered it with freshly cut chillies, but I was able to make out what was going on around me. 

I thanked the people I was with and went to find my friends from USyd, as well as Max and Alek from Noise and The Tert, respectively. Most of them were gathered beneath the outdoor concert area, which was where the most severely injured people were taken. I took several photos of them and of the crowd back towards the barricades, where the police and remaining protesters were still facing off. People around me were sharing saline, antihistamines, bottles of water, and wet wipes. Everyone was trying to make sure that the people more hurt than they were were receiving treatment and attention. 

One of my USyd comrades, Aron Khuc, was more seriously injured than anyone else I saw. He had been pepper sprayed so badly that he was lying on the floor; it was painful to watch a nurse asking him to open his eyes to flush them. 

He told me afterwards, “I was helping out a comrade who got injured by the police in the initial encounter and was trying to get out to seek a medic. When we tried to leave the group, one of the cops pushed us back violently, saying, ‘This is what you get for being part of this protest,’ despite us yelling that he needed a medic. It was pretty brutal seeing how inhumane the cops were in blocking protesters from seeking medical aid.”

Max Richter-Weinstein, Noise (University of New South Wales)

It was cold in Darling Harbour as I walked down with my friend and roommate to the IMAX, our designated meeting point for the morning's proceedings. There were only a few people around at 6:10 am and it was quiet and peaceful, but as we got closer, we noticed multiple groups of riot squad police standing around and several riding in on horseback. 

We stopped to join a friend close to the water, and while we were waiting there with her, three police officers approached us and said that if we were there for the protest, we were in an unauthorised area and needed to move to Tumbalong Park. As we got ourselves ready, they tried to hurry us along, becoming increasingly frustrated that we weren’t complying. Eventually, we joined a slightly larger crowd that was gathering around some benches and we started making sure that everyone had water and masks.

It seemed like there might not be the most successful turnout, but soon we heard the loud chants of the Palestine Action Group (PAG) making their way towards us with a large crowd.

This is when things got a bit intense. 

As we joined up with the larger group, the police rushed towards us and started pushing us backwards. We were told to link arms and not let them hassle us around. The horses came over and started pushing against us as well, and in an instant, a cop right beside me pepper-sprayed some people just to my left, which caused more people to disperse. I walked to the back of the pack to try and get a better angle of what was going on while cops yelled at protestors aggressively to move and shoved people backwards and further into the large group, as those who were sprayed were carried to nearby benches to get some help. 

A friend of mine, Alyss Cachia (UNSW SRC Queer Officer), walked past me carrying someone who was limping and calling out to me to make sure I knew it had happened, to include in this report. In speaking to the injured person's friend and fellow party member, Milo Riggs from the Young Greens, he said, “A friend…was pushed back by the cops, making his knee bend the wrong way. He couldn’t walk properly for the rest of the day.”

After the chaos of multiple rounds of pepper spray, tramplings, injuries and arrests, the protestors eventually complied with the order given by police to assemble in Tumbalong Park, which had been fenced in to control the group and was a far cry from their goal to block the entrance to this expo. As we arrived into the fenced-off area of the park, I heard from someone next to me that multiple medics had been arrested at the beginning of the protest, which was worrying. If the violence had already gotten out of hand that quickly, I was not feeling optimistic about the rest of the day's proceedings, and I was right to have that fear. 

The speaking list started with members of Socialist Alternative from many universities across the city, including Yasmin Johnson and Jasmine Al Rawi from the University of Sydney, Gina Elias from Western Sydney University and Owen Marsden-Readford from the University of New South Wales, all condemning the gathering that was being held inside the ICC. 

This is when I met up with fellow student journalists Imogen Sabey from Honi Soit and Alek Sekulovski from The Tert, who had also come to the protest to cover the proceedings of the day.

As more and more people came to the front to speak from all sorts of activist groups, such as Josh Lees from PAG and Zack Schofield from Rising Tide — who went right up to the lines of cops directly at the barricade to decry their choice to defend the happenings at the expo — the crowd grew more tense. Eventually, we were also pressed up against the barricade, facing the cops lined up all across the other side, horses lined up behind them.

As the attendees of the expo began trickling in, the protesters got louder and louder and began rocking the barricades and really cramming into the front right section. The rows and rows of officers in front of the barricade moved up towards it and held back the barricades as protesters continued to cram in and link arms. This semi-standoff between police and the protestors lasted a few minutes before, towards my right, I saw a plume of smoke drift into the air and heard people screaming and running away coughing. I ran too.

As I turned back, there was still a giant wave of pepper spray being unleashed on people, with many people running, tripping, falling to the ground, screaming and coughing. As I made my way back towards the right-hand side of the park, many were sprayed right in the face, and I took my water bottle out of my bag and helped as many people as I could flush their eyes out with just one bottle of water.

I found Alek eventually, and we both realised we didn’t know where Imogen had gone. After a while of searching and mistaking her for several other people with striped shirts on, we found her up the back of the group in the area with the medics. She’d been pepper-sprayed quite badly. I found several others I knew back there, also having been hit hard. In speaking to Ana Dougenis, next year's Students with Disabilities Officer elect on the UNSW SRC, who was badly pepper-sprayed, she said that, “We saw war criminals welcomed with open arms at the same time as seeing police use their force to blind and harm us as much as they could. I saw people on the floor writhing in pain as I stumbled to make my own way to my friends and to the medics.”

The medics were amazing and tried their absolute hardest to help as many people as possible, but as Riggs said to me, “there weren’t nearly enough of them, and those who’d been sprayed had no idea where to go or what to do.”

As many people were at the back being attended to, several people who were sprayed were still making their way to safety in very severe pain. As people tried to run in and help those people, they were pepper-sprayed more as multiple cops had now jumped the fence and were spraying anyone who got too close.

A few groups of chanters who weren’t too badly hurt started back up as people continued to writhe on the ground in pain and be attended to in multiple large groups across the back of the park. This went on for quite a while, and eventually, as more people recovered, they started gathering back up at the front again. Many injured people stayed up the back with the medics, changing their clothes, having food and water (and also a cheeky cigarette for some) and recovering from the genuinely traumatic thing they’d just experienced. I left shortly after.

I can’t quite explain the intensity of the adrenaline I felt in that situation, especially when I hadn’t been hurt myself, but everyone around me was screaming in pain, completely blinded, and all I could think to do was help them in the simplest way I knew how. I have tried to recount the memories of after that pepper spray over the past few days, and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to remember how it felt to witness that level of violence from police, the likes of which I’d never seen at a peaceful protest in this city before. Watching videos of the attacks after the incident has been harrowing, and the pride and pleasure on the cops' faces as they sprayed down and blinded so many people is so uncomfortable to watch. 

Tyberius Seeto, Vertigo (University of Technology Sydney)

My morning of the blockade was filled with reporters on my TV doing their live crosses from Tumbalong Park, while my social media feed was filled with footage of people getting shoved by police. I have covered and attended many rallies during my time at university, watching as often tense moments between activists almost hit a boiling point. I have also seen those moments of the boiling point spilling out into full-blown violence from police, yet for some reason that morning, I did not feel great; I felt nervous and, for the first time in a while, scared.

By the time my bus arrived at my stop, my group chats of friends and comrades were filled with messages:

“We’re covered in pepper spray.”

“Shit is absolutely fucked.”

“Bastards.”

Photos of people I know, their eyes irritated and red, made my stomach drop. It wasn’t just the “activist-y” type of friends and comrades who were sprayed by police. Reporters, elderly people, middle-aged husbands and their wives, it didn’t matter how much you engaged in activism or how long you’d been calling for an end to the occupation and ongoing genocide in Palestine. To the police, they had disrupted the peace and quiet for the warmongers to continue to showcase their weapons of destruction and to profit from Palestinian corpses.

How dare they come out from 6:30 in the morning to rightfully protest against their government’s and their institutions’ endorsement of genocide? 

As I arrived near the ICC, I could already see people in keffiyehs walking around me, heading into any of the local convenience stores and tobacconists to grab water, in the likely event that the police would deploy their capsaicin spray again.

By 9:30am, my friends who were pepper-sprayed had left to change clothes and shower as the crowds slowly began to dwindle, yet you could feel the anger permeating from almost everyone at the park. As I was talking to a friend who brought snacks and water bottles for people, I caught sight of a lone expo attendee cutting through the park to get to the ICC, accompanied by a police officer, followed by a person in a green keffiyeh yelling and pointing their finger at him.

By the time he was in eyeshot of my friend, the larger group of protesters had turned around to shame this blatant example of state-sanctioned violence. The smugness in the man's face was visceral, knowing the police would protect him from his crimes, as shouts of “shame” and “war criminal” filled the air.

Pulling out my phone, I ran to the crowd to film more cops arriving and shoving people out of the way. As the man finally made it across to the gate, capsaicin spray was deployed for the second time that day, the spray narrowly missing me as I ran to where the street medics were to let them know what had happened. Despite most expo attendees being forced to make alternative routes to get into the ICC, it still puzzles me why this man not only had the gall to cross through the protest, but why the police also decided to give him an exception to their rule of order and let him cut through.

I ended up sitting by the medics in a state of fear as I watched people drenching their faces in water to relieve the pain from getting sprayed in the eyes; tears streaming across their red faces. I witnessed one person crying before throwing up, their friends wrapping their arms around them and pouring water over their face.

Less than an hour later, I found myself filming again as police rushed over to tackle several protestors, after what looked like paint was thrown moments prior. It felt as if the police were tackling anyone who had the human reaction of running from danger, men and women in uniform armed to the teeth, who, only hours before, showed that they would become violent at any moment. I grabbed my friend and dodged over to the side next to an ABC News reporter as a protester in front of us was grabbed by police. Soon, more cops started circling protestors while mounted police advanced dangerously close to the heads of protestors being tackled on the ground. Pepper spray would again be deployed, with medics rushing to help those who were hurt.

As the blockade ended, we marched up to Town Hall before dispersing, the day marked by shocking levels of police violence, something which neither I nor UTS Students Association Disabilities Officer, Amelia Ireland, had seen since getting involved in activism.

“I was lucky enough to not get pepper-sprayed directly, but I was close enough to breathe in a lot of tear gas and pepper spray that was still hanging around in the air,” she told me.

“I was coughing and sneezing for hours and hours afterwards and was really unwell because of it.”

“Protesters were completely outnumbered by police, what felt like almost three times over. When people were pepper-sprayed, I ran in to assist the medics, and I could see police officers laughing at those of us who were sprayed and those of us who were helping them.”

Ireland pointed her finger at the Chris Minns Labor government's anti-protest legislation as a reason why police were so emboldened to be so trigger-happy in quelling peaceful protest through sheer tactical violence.

Like almost every other institution in this country, UTS has had its hand in the ongoing genocide in Palestine through partnerships with weapons manufacturers like Thales. It wasn’t shocking to me or Ireland that our institution would have an exhibit at the expo.

“Finding out that UTS was in attendance at the weapons expo was absolutely disgusting and appalling to me, particularly considering the student body’s extensive protests and actions against weapons on campus, against the genocide in Gaza and against our institutions' material support for the genocide,” she said.

As the expo wraps up and the profiteers of this genocide fill their pockets with contracts, profits and blood, the fight to end it needs to continue.

Jared Kimpton, Vertigo (UTS)

This piece is less of a recount of police violence, as my fellow writers have done in great detail, and more my experience dealing with exposure to pepper spray and reflecting on the moral failing that its use represents. 

Pepper spray has a very casual place in the public consciousness; most people have only encountered it through the classic ‘pepper spray joke’ (character does something bad, gets pepper-sprayed, screams). It's acknowledged as a device police use sometimes to disorientate. But being pepper-sprayed at the blockade of the ICC has given me a dark insight into why pepper spray is legally defined as “less-than-lethal.” 

Pepper spray is banned for use in warfare under Article I.5 of the Chemical Weapons Convention, of which Australia is a signatory. However, this convention doesn’t extend to law enforcement, which is why it is used by police forces worldwide. 

It’s darkly ironic that a weapon deemed too inhumane for warfare was fired at a crowd outside a conference where companies — with credible links to genocide and war crimes — were selling their blood-drenched wares.

The Chris Minns government has sent a clear message: they’d rather attack, kettle and use chemical weapons on Sydneysiders than shut out war criminals. 

Yet, it can’t be forgotten that UTS set up their own stall at this expo. While our university’s representatives got chummy with war profiteers, UTS students, including me, were being pepper-sprayed outside. But again, this is not surprising; UTS continues to be an enthusiastic participant in global suffering.

If I’ve learned anything from my encounter with this weapon, it is that its terror and effectiveness are vastly understated in the public consciousness. You can only truly understand how despicable its use is once you’ve been hit by it. But to give you some insight, I’ll be exposing my experience: a tame case of pepper spray exposure. 

I was sprayed when the crowd bunched up, pushing on safety fences at Tumbalong Park towards the ICC. The cops used a larger long-range canister — not the ones they carry on the hips — that hissed loudly. The spray was shot over the crowd, I assume to affect as many protestors as possible. 

Pepper spray is used in crowd control because the pain activates your lizard brain, a fight-or-flight response, which sends crowds scattering away. But you can’t fight or run from a poison that's now on your skin and in your face, eyes and mouth. So you immediately forget why you’re there, and your only concern is getting rid of the pain.

I was very lucky to be further back in the crowd, wearing sunglasses and a keffiyeh over my face. The spray was fired in an arc over my head, so I received less of a direct spray and more of a chemical misting. But pepper spray is invasive and sticky by design — it soaks through clothes. So I was sputtering, coughing and tearing up. It was not long before I had to remove my keffiyeh because the spray had soaked through it. In your mouth and nose, it feels like ultra-hot chillies, and in the air, it smells like spicy chemicals.

Worse was the spray that had landed on my exposed arms and began to sting. The next evil of pepper spray is that, like oil, it isn't soluble in water. It sinks into your skin and can’t be simply washed away.

But I had it easy in comparison to some of my comrades, who in that instance and many others throughout the day, took full-frontal blasts of pepper spray. The pain of getting it in your eyes is debilitating; some would just fall to the ground and writhe in agony. You're blind, eyes welded shut from the irritation. All the previously described effects of exposure are only worsened with a direct burst.

I saw all this in great detail as I helped treat, by complete coincidence, fellow journalist Imogen Sabey, with water and saline solution given to me by a medic. 

I only felt the later effects of pepper spray after the protest had concluded and I was travelling home. Though my eyes, nose and mouth had cleared, the affected skin, which had only been stinging until now, turned into what I could only describe as feeling like the world’s worst sunburn. It became very sensitive to light and heat. Part of this article was written (very painfully) with searing hands.

As soon as I returned home, I had to throw all my affected clothes in the washer and begin the process of thoroughly washing the spray off my body. I used dish soap for the first round, which I had read online was the best at removing the substance from my skin, due to its non-soluble nature. I was also lucky to live near the beach, where I could go and rub saltwater into my arms, which helped immensely. Getting it out of my hair was like ringing boiling water out of a towel, and it started a whole new round of stinging as the infused water ran down my body. 

Yet again, I can only begin to imagine the process for others, especially without such easy access to salt water. Probably long, cold showers with vigorous scrubbing, forcing the eyes open under running water.

I’ve written about my experience, because the reality is not seen or talked about. In popular culture, if a character is pepper-sprayed, they’re fine a few minutes later in the next scene. You don’t see the writhing, the crying, the hours of burning skin and the painful process of removing it from your body. Pepper spray is a plot device, a comedy tool, a prop for cops.

Nope.

Pepper spray is a chemical weapon. A weapon that's somehow too inhumane for warfare, but very humane to use on protestors, prisoners, the homeless and the mentally ill, as has been done again and again. 

In the end, even though my skin burned, I had a smile on my face. I won that pain in the fight for what was right. The physical pain is temporary, but the feeling of having stood against those who bow down to war criminals and who’d sooner harm their own neighbours than step out of line was so, so worth it.

Around the third or fourth time pepper spray was deployed, and the crowd reunited, I saw a woman being led out by a volunteer. Her eyes were glued shut, but she was still keeping up the chants. I saw a middle-aged man who was pepper-sprayed twice, but he still returned. In fact, so many comrades who faced a pepper spray attack returned to the front lines soon after. That's the strength of solidarity: the weapons can chase us back for a few minutes, but inhumane chemical weapons can’t douse a movement or an idea.

You shouldn’t be afraid of pepper spray, because fear lets repression win. When I was hit, I wasn’t afraid; I was angry, and it only made me double down. Because while the cops can try and burn us, our hearts are already aflame. 

Resources: 

University of Sydney:

• SRC Caseworker contact form

• SRC Legal Service: 02 9660 5222

• Student Counselling Service: +61 2 8627 8433

• SCS email: student.wellbeing@sydney.edu.au

UNSW: 

• UNSW Mental Health Service: call on (02) 9385 5418 or text on 0485 862 595

• ###phttps://www.arc.unsw.edu.au/he...

• UNSW Psychology and Wellness: https://unsw.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_7P5OepTL4eJDztb or call after hours on 02 9385 5418

University of Wollongong:

• UOW 24-hour Student Wellbeing Support Line:

• Call 1300 036 149

• Text 0488 884 164

• Wollongong Campus Medical Centre

• Located in Building 11 on level 1

• Call 02 4216 5590 to book an appointment

• UOW Safe and Respectable Communities (SARC)

• Located in Building 19 on the ground floor, room G100

• Call 02 4221 3344 (9am to 4:30pm)

• Email uow-sarc@uow.edu.au

• UOW Legal Clinic

• Call 02 4276 1939 and press 3

University of Technology Sydney: 

• UTS Counselling Service: +61 2 9514 1177, student.services@uts.edu.au
  

• UTS Legal Service: 02 9514 2484, studentlegalservice@uts.edu.au

• UTS Accessibility: +61 2 9514 1177, accessibility@uts.edu.au

Pepper spray health advice: 

• Naarm Frontline Medics (NFM) Dos & Don’ts of pepper spray

• NFM Pepper Spray aftercare