What is Rising Tide? It’s ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The successful blockade of Newcastle coal port stands as the largest act of civil disobedience in Australia’s recent history, with around 8,000 people taking part.
It is created by people like you and me. Over the four days most people I met were taking enormous risks, or giving extraordinary time and effort to this event.
Rising Tide is unique in its fine-tuned organisation without being centralised or controlled top-down. People are given strategic support to act in diverse, self-initiated, and surprising ways.
Onwater training includes kayaking in ‘buddy systems’ and grouping into pods to
penetrate lines of water police. Training also covers what to expect from arrest, detention, and the legal consequences, so people are very well-equipped to decide on their personal actions.
This year Rising Tide’s ‘guided freedom structure’ helped spawn new spontaneous actions. A small group decided to swim into the channel from different directions (including a four kilometre swim upstream).
Police seemed to be caught off-guard as swimmers reached the shipping channel causing the shutdown of all ship movements for 24 hours.
Another brave team chose to lock themselves to coal-loading machinery for six hours, again catching police and port security off guard. This extended the port closure by another whole day. All-up the blockade prevented 13 tanker loads.
People may not realise that Newcastle is the world’s largest coal port exporting 15 million tonnes per month.
Pearl Whitfield, a graduate from Mullumbimby High School, said ‘I’ve spent most of my life feeling helpless in the face of the crushing climate crisis. This action has given me drive and purpose and made me realise that it’s not too late to save this beautiful planet’.
Pearl was part of the main action in a flotilla of around 300 kayaks. She paddled out into the shipping channel with 50 others and seven police boats gave chase. Pearl stayed out there ‘singing and chanting’ and evading police for as long as possible.
‘I don’t regret getting arrested and intend to do it again because this fight is not going to be won unless people like us take action,’ she said.
Get involved
‘So, if you want to get involved there’s a local Northern Rivers hub (go to the Rising Tide website: www.risingtide.org.au). This movement gives you hope, giving up and accepting a burning planet is letting these big corporations win’.
Mullumbimby local and former Byron Shire Councillor, Duncan Dey, was also at the blockade in the role of boat driver for the safety team.
He stepped out of that role to become boat driver for a group called People of Faith who had agreed, like he had, to be arrested.
‘With a deaf government this is one of the ways in which people can speak up,’ said Duncan. Duncan drove the boat out into the waterway exclusion zone where police stopped them but arrested only the skipper, Duncan.
‘The crew of seven People of Faith were very disappointed not to be arrested,’ said Duncan.
Shay Salmon, a teacher from Lismore, partnered with her daughter to do a marathon six hours paddling each day of the protest. She says what keeps her coming back each year is the frustration she feels as our existential crisis is met with ‘ignorance, apathy, and denial in the general community’.
Growing numbers of people from Lismore come to the blockade each year. She says ‘this is not only because we have had direct experience of climate change but we have already shown what “people action” can achieve in the Bentley blockade’.
At the ‘Protestival’ I joined the Northern Rivers hub. It is a group of strong, resourceful people, many of whom are also central to the Save Wallum campaign.
The Rising Tide movement is more than the Newcastle blockade. The plan ahead is for decentralised hubs to continue to take necessary action to keep the climate crisis front and centre and impossible to ignore.
Despite the rhetoric, Australia is a big player in global CO2 emissions.
Worldwide renewable energy is expected to grow more than four-fold from next year on. It would be economic insanity for us to miss this boat. Let’s hope that stopping a few boats and the international notoriety helps Australia to finally get on the right boat
going in the right direction.
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