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Article Excerpt
Men, women, and children poured to the place from all parts of the city, many of whom were overheard to remark that it was better than a play. (1)
Australians share a common belief in the public right to parade and to demonstrate, and see it as an enshrined legal requirement of a liberal democratic society. Presently in Melbourne, there are no permits available for marches, protests or rallies; rather they are seen as events to be managed by municipal, transport and law enforcement authorities. The notion of a public right to march in city streets has a historical lineage in practice as well as legislation. As the urban landscape has transformed, with the advent of the motor car and television and the consequent transformation of the interface between procession and spectator, so too have ideas of civilisation and democracy. It is from a present context of ambiguous rights and increasing legislation clamping down on dissent that we look to past displays of public processions, focussing on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century processions in Melbourne.
Frank Brennan claims that there was a marked increase in the use of meetings and processions for political protest from 1966 onwards, (2) arguing that this rapid development coincided with US President Johnson's visit to major Australian cities in October and November 1966. There was, however, evident public outrage against the Vietnam War before this time, and processions have always potentially been utilised for political purposes. Brennan further supports his argument by detailing Victorian police attitudes to the 'new demonstration phenomenon', where demonstrations develop from being 'unusual happenings' in 1966 to 'possibly one of the most demanding problems confronting police' in 1968. (3) Authorities other than the police, such as the public transport organisations, were showing signs of frustration at the apparent increasing presence of demonstrations well before 1966. On 8 February 1957, the Secretary of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board wrote a lengthy letter to the Melbourne Town Clerk, noting that the Board was 'increasingly perturbed at the frequency with which Parades, Processions and the like are causing interference and upset to its services.' (4) Although the Vietnam moratoriums, which occurred in May and September 1970 and in June 1971, were arguably the biggest demonstrations Australia had seen since World War II, they have perhaps exercised disproportionate influence on popular understandings of the traditions of parade and protest across the city's entire history. It is this that this article seeks in part to address, by providing a typology of street processions as well as pointing to the regulatory frameworks in which they occurred.
Setting the Scene
Compared to Decoration Day in New York, wrote an Australian in America in the 1880s, 'processions in the colonies are pretty shows and nothing more. There is nothing in them to stir the blood or add a lustre to the eye. The elements of the heroic and the historic are absent.' (5) For the Australian tourist of the late 1880s, Melbourne's public processions were evidently a pale shadow of their American counterparts. Mary Ryan has claimed that the parade as 'a species of procession' was an American invention. The American parade as a distinctive mode of public celebration, she argues, is distinguished by three features: clear organisation into separate marching units, the involvement of a large proportion of local population, and marching for the sake of marching rather than heading for a pre-determined ritual event or place. The word 'parade' is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an American nomenclature, though it was not uncommon in nineteenth-century Australian usage. Indeed, the patterns of behaviour identified by 'parade' or 'procession' bear close similarities. The nineteenth-century Australian procession was often called a 'demonstration', lacking the element of protest that the word connotes in the twenty-first century. (6)
While the American show was no doubt impressive, the streets of Melbourne were regularly claimed by processions as ceremonial and symbolic space. Over the past century, however, the range of street processions as regular forms of public display significantly diminished. The social outings, displays of mutual aid societies, annual anniversaries of social, civic and religious bodies, the arrival and departure of VIPs, and the missionary marches of the Salvation Army, are now confined to more infrequent and large-scale sporting, political or commercial demonstrations, as much to do with civic ambition as with individual or community representation.
Anzac Day (April 25), the AFL Grand Final parade (September), and the parade of champion horses for Melbourne Cup Day (November), along with political rallies, peace or pride marches and the occasional civic reception or state funeral, remain as remnant processional occasions. It might be argued, however, that they have lost much of their potency as displays of civic, municipal or political order--as once expressed through the symbolism of their routes or the protocols of their processional order--becoming instead more secular occasions as much for the display of sponsoring logos and the consumption of mass television audiences. On a suburban scale, urban ceremonial has often decentralised into a much more limited calendar of public ceremonies or local festivals often organised for the most part by local businesses or traders associations as commercial advertisements. The procession tradition in the central city grid has no doubt been subsumed by other celebratory practices, transformed into the annual inner-suburban street festivals, replete with take-away food stalls, buskers, rock bands and street markets replacing the vocabulary and epic style of the St Patrick's Day or the Druid's annual processions. However, even this trend of street festivals is being increasingly encroached upon by the demands and pressures of modern insurance (public liability) requirements. Modern air-conditioned twin-deck coaches with tinted windows, luxury seats, videos, toilets and seating capacities equivalent to a score of drags and wagons, now transport social and sporting groups to functions or outings. Once the act and the form of going were as important and publicly significant as the destination. Motor transport, however, has in effect debased intervening space which was once of itself more socially meaningful. Perhaps too the functions of the procession have merely been transposed into other areas. Twenty-first century public urban culture flickers across the surrogate communities of the television screen, talkback radio and the shopping mall as much as it used to be played out in the streets. (7)
Transformations in the concept of public space have been based...
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