Bodies of protest : performing citizenship at the 2000 Olympic Games

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

    Abstract

    At the end of September 2000, after years of hype and speculation, the Sydney Olympics closed without major controversy. To oblige the burgeoning pride of Sydneysiders and sports-loving Australians in general, the President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, described the 2000 Games as the best ever. Sydney had managed to stage the world’s largest peacetime event with minimum disruption: no terrorist attacks, no transport clogs, not even the expected disturbance of street demonstrations. Among enthusiasts of the Games, the perception that they had not become a platform for protest groups was a particular point of celebration. In the years leading up to the Sydney Games, the threat of protests at the Olympics had become a familiar feature of Australian political life. Most memorable among these warnings was the Indigenous activist Charles Perkins’ April 2000 declaration that Sydney would ‘burn, baby, burn’ during the event. Not surprisingly, governments and Olympics organizing agenies took steps to forestall protest action. New legislation was passed restricting the right to public assembly on Olympic sites and making provision for the deployment of military forces against civilians. The Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) moved to diffuse Indigenous protest by awarding the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, one of the city’s most active Indigenous groups, the contract to stage the official Indigenous cultural display in the Olympic Park. As the Games approached, politicians and Olympics officials began a war of words against protesters, characterizing their proposed activities as unAustralian, a term that was also being bandied about to describe the planned S11 protests at the World Economic Forum in Melbourne. The present paper explores the way in which this rhetoric and the nationalist sentiment to which it appealed shaped the protest activities that were planned for the Olympics. My basic premise is that these activities were indeed unAustralian, not in the sense that they contravened mythical qualities such as mateship or the fair-go but because they involved performances of citizenship that exceeded the constitutional frame of the Australian nation-state. Contrary to mainstream belief, the protests surrounding the Sydney Olympic Games were quite successful. It is just that these activities did not take the expected form of street demonstrations, but sought rather to avoid violent conflict while working through the communicative networks of the media.
    Original languageEnglish
    Number of pages13
    JournalContinuum
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2002

    Keywords

    • Australia
    • Citizenship
    • Globalization
    • Olympic Games. 27th 2000 Sydney, N.S.W.
    • Protest movements

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