As long as people gather
Part one: Inheritance
24 March 1980
Archbishop Oscar Romero, defender of the poor, outspoken critic of the dictatorship was assassinated while celebrating mass because he was outspoken. Over fifty thousand attended his funeral, which became one of the biggest demonstrations for human rights in El Salvador’s history. The military fired at the demonstrators, killing at least 40.
As a child I believed protests meant the world was not about to end. Someone, although I don’t remember who, told me that the Bible said that during the end times there would be no bearing of witness, no protest. Child me reasoned that as long as there were protests in the street the world was holding.
I was raised in a very catholic family, my father even trained for the priesthood before Opus Dei’s discipline forced him from seminary. Ours was a catholicism infused and influenced by liberation theology, a Christian movement that affirms, in fact demands, the liberation of the oppressed. It’s no surprise that liberation theology was born in Latin America and took hold in El Salvador. The deep, structural poverty, hunger, lack, disease and extreme violence imposed on El Salvador since colonisation was, by the 70s, developing into deep civic unrest. When this unrest combined with Marxist thought and Catholic doctrine then liberation theology was probably inevitable.
And the violence was extreme. In the year that I was born, over six-thousand Salvadorans were killed due to political violence alone, including Marianela Garcia Villas, President of the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission. She was kidnapped and murdered for documenting over three-thousand “forced disappearances”, fifty-thousand murders and the incarceration of 700 political dissidents.
The violence was targeted. The military fired into picket lines, death squads forced the “disappearance” of unionists, the dictatorship executed civilians by the tens of thousands, in one instance massacring over 30,000 people in three days.
The violence was sanctioned, such that the country’s political class saw no issue in organising for a sniper to assassinate the country’s archbishop while he was celebrating mass in the chapel of a cancer hospital. One shot, possibly two, straight to his heart while he was at the altar. The Salvadoran Civil War was so brutal it displaced 20% of the Salvadoran population, myself and my family included.
This is the violence that I was born into. Extrajudicial killing, “disappearances”, torture, and repression was the background to my childhood, and the lived reality of all of the people that I knew and loved. It was one of those people who told me, to reassure me or themselves, that the Bible said that as long as people were bearing witness to injustice the world would not end. This belief became a central part of my identity and shaped my world view forever.
The Salvadoran Civil War ended in 1992, its scars have not yet healed despite appearances to the contrary. How do you bring healing to a nation that spent 12 years killing each other? Romero, Saint Oscar Romero, whose assassination was the single act that propelled the country into war, was canonised by Pope Francis in 2018. He was named the patron saint of El Salvador, Christian communicators, and the persecuted. Schools, roads, human rights organisations, libraries, even El Salvador’s airport are all named after him.
Romero is more present in Salvadoran public life than ever, his image in El Salvador is ubiquitous. Today you’re likely to see his bespectacled and weary face everywhere from tee shirts to murals, posters and statues. Nayib Bukele, the “world’s coolest dictator” (his words, not mine) and current Salvadoran president holds court in front of an enormous portrait of the martyred Romero. Notably, Bukele’s regime is so repressive he is responsible for jailing around 2% of the entire Salvadoran population, to do this he has built the largest prison compound in the world. He has suspended constitutional protections for human rights, including the right to due process, the presumption of innocence, and the protections for protest all while Romero hovers over his shoulder.
Bukele’s government has been credibly accused of extrajudicial killing, “disappearances”, torture, and repression. Things he has done with the overwhelming support of Salvadorans. His approval rating is the highest of any leader in the Western Hemisphere, a recent poll put it at 92%. Salvadorans supported, or at least turned a blind eye to, the exact same type of violence that Romero condemned. We were quick to turn our country into a shrine to his image but in doing so forgot his message.
The violence that Romero condemned was so extreme, and bearing public witness felt so important that my parent’s, the most apolitical people on earth, were moved to march during Romero’s funeral and were fired upon. They survived the ensuing massacre by hiding under an ambulance. They would go on to survive another massacre by the war’s end. This is the context that I was born into. This was my inheritance.
Before I learned that I was queer, before understanding that the world is hostile to brown bodies, before knowing what politics even was, I inherited the understanding that bearing public witness is an obligation. To this day, every time I see a protest I say a prayer, for the protest, for the protesters, and (sometimes) the cause. I pray in gratitude but also with relief because as long as people are gathering that can only mean the world is holding. My faith that protest prevents the apocalypse has in fact outlived my faith in God.
Part two: Forgetting
7 January 1914
Suffragettes throw a dynamite bomb into Harewood Barracks, a police training facility. The following month they fire-bombed the home of British Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna. The suffragette’s two-year bombing and arson campaign left 24 injured and killed four.
Every generation inherits their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights as settled facts. We can forget, deliberately or conveniently, that each right used to be a dangerous, outrageous, inconvenient, unrealistic, disruptive, annoying demand. We are all inheritors of rights that were won at protests we didn’t attend.
Today we learn about the successful campaign for women’s suffrage as something that was inevitable. Our textbooks show images of polite suffragettes holding banners but a more realistic portrayal would have them holding bombs. The term “suffragette” itself was coined by the Daily Mail in 1906 to demean and belittle the women and their campaign.
The suffragettes did ask for the vote peacefully at first but the men in Parliament didn't care enough to listen. After their petitions and pickets also proved unsuccessful they intensified their advocacy. They smashed windows, cut telephone wires, engaged in property damage, two suffragettes even mailed themselves to 10 Downing Street to hand deliver Prime Minister Asquith their demands (they were returned to sender as ‘dead letters). Many were arrested, beaten and tortured for their advocacy; politicians passed special laws targeting them in an attempt to extinguish their activism.
Today, we would call the suffragettes terrorists (which legally speaking, they probably were), politicians would accuse them of fraying social cohesion. Police would charge them for making people uncomfortable, parliaments would condemn their tactics. When those in power speak of contemporary social movements in the same terms, we should remember that even the struggle for something as fundamental and accepted as women’s suffrage was neither gentle nor uncontested. The right to vote, like all others was hard won through conflict, sacrifice and public witness.
I see parallels with how we honour Sydney’s Mardi Gras, we don’t appear willing or capable to celebrate both the struggle and its success in equal measure.
On 24 June 1978, Sydney’s Gay Solidarity Group organised a march for queer rights. NSW Police abruptly ended the march and arrested 53, beating many. The Sydney Morning Herald published the names and occupations of those arrested causing them serious professional and social consequences as homosexuality was criminalised at the time. Those protesting, arrested, and outed in 1978 didn’t know they were taking part in the first Mardi Gras at the time, let alone that they were marching into our nation’s history.
Today Mardi Gras is viewed as a celebration, one in which the police that humiliated and beat the first marchers now expects to participate in, albeit not without tension. In 2024, the NSW Police Commissioner, the Premier and the Minister for Police were publicly demanding that NSW Police be included in our celebration- it would be a backwards step to deny them a place, they said. At the time, our community was deliberating whether NSW Police should play any role in Mardi Gras following the alleged murder of two gay men by a NSW Police officer. After much consideration Mardi Gras allowed Police to march, on the condition they did so unarmed and out of uniform.
The NSW Government, a financial sponsor of Mardi Gras, whose Police Force expects and is now expected to march in our parade has also passed the most anti protest laws in Australia. In fact, if the first Mardi Gras was happening today, each one could have been liable for a $22,000 fine or two years in jail, or both, just for temporarily obstructing the street. The anti-protest regime in NSW is in fact the most oppressive in the country. What does it do to our memory of struggle when we accept NSW government funding to celebrate rights won through protest while the same government is deliberately trying to make future protests impossible.
This is not to argue against celebrating Mardi Gras, nor that it should not receive government support, but there is a danger that in focusing our attention on the celebration, we miss that it was built on a foundation of public witness and resistance. To forget that collective action and public witness won the rights we enjoy is to also forget that collective action is how new rights are won.
I came of age during the worst of the AIDS epidemic, HIV during my lifetime has gone from a death sentence to an illness that can be managed. This achievement was also won through protest and resistance. I grew up inspired by this HIV activism, I inherited its gains: decriminalisation, anti-discrimination laws, cheap HIV medications, even the language that I use to describe myself and my identity. Being born into a war, and coming of age during a plague has impressed in me the duty to bear public witness but also the necessity to protect the ability to do so. I am all too aware that I inherited rights that were won at protests I was too young to attend.
Part Three: Rememory
26 January 1972
Michael Anderson, Billy Craigie, Tony Coorey, and Bertie Williams planted a beach umbrella on the lawns of Canberra’s Provisional Parliament House in protest against the violent and ongoing dispossession and displacement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Williams called this tiny protest an embassy. The Aboriginal flag was flown here for the first time.
My belief that without public witness the world ends led me to become a human rights lawyer. If there is one thing I have learned during my time fighting to protect our right to protest from police, parliaments and politicians is that protesters are always right in history books, but never in today’s headlines.
Parliaments around the country have introduced more than 49 anti protest laws in the last 12 years with NSW leading this anti-democratic race to the bottom. The nation’s many anti protest laws are also incredibly broad and vague, criminalising things like ‘obstructing a public place’ or ‘causing inconvenience’. This breadth allows them to be used against any protest, of any size, at any time. In one failed legislative proposal, Western Australia tried to criminalise possessing “a thing” if it could be used during a picket or a boycott.
The eight hour workday, the success of the trade union movement and its campaigns for sick leave, paid annual leave, and worker safety. Women’s suffrage and equal pay, access to HIV medication and contraceptives, safe and legal abortion, First Nations land rights, the dismantling of the White Australia policy. Movements against apartheid, nuclear weapons, and uranium mining. The disability rights movement, the advocacy of survivors of institutional child sexual abuse which led to the establishment of a Royal Commission. The fact that the Franklin River was never dammed, all of this was won through protest and public witness. This is our collective inheritance whether we personally marched for it or not.
The work of justice is not done, of course. But as we do the work we must remember that the success of today’s campaigns for climate justice, First Nations justice, justice for people seeking asylum, disability justice, trans justice, and peace in Gaza depend equally on our willingness to protest and our ability to do so. If the rights we enjoy are our inheritance then protest is the testament through which they were bequeathed.
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy was added to Australia’s national heritage list in 1999, it is the world’s oldest, continuous protest for First Nations rights; it celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2022.Politicians from parties whose official policy is to criminalise those marching to end the genocide in Gaza, celebrated the Tent Embassy’s golden jubilee with platitudes about the importance of resistance. Conveniently omitting that it was their predecessors that passed special laws to have the Embassy dismantled at every opportunity. Hundreds were arrested, beaten, mocked and dispersed by police throughout the Embassy’s history, but the protesters returned every time. The hypocrisy of governments who prefer our activism to be only historical should disgust us.
In his time, Romero was attacked as a communist terrorist, the suffragettes were tortured and subjected to sexual violence. The first Mardi Gras was brutally repressed by NSW Police and those arrested were publicly outed. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy was fire bombed. Repulsion of people living with HIV was expected, rewarded and institutionalised. The rights we now regard as settled facts were once little more than demands shouted in the streets by people brave enough to bear public witness. We fail their bravery if we celebrate their achievements without also recognising the price they paid to achieve them. We should celebrate how far we have come, and do so proudly but truthfully. To tell the whole story of our progress, and to make progress possible for others, we must honour the victories we inherited as well as the public witness that made them possible.
Someone once told me, I don’t know who, that so long as people were bearing public witness the world was not about to end. In writing this essay I returned to the Bible to find the exact passage that formed the cornerstone of my belief but I was unable. The closest was in Revelation 11:3, which predicts the witness of prophets during the end times. The prophets, according to scripture, will bear witness to the things the world would rather ignore and the Great Beast will seek out the prophets to devour them, the world will exchange gifts and rejoice as the prophets die because their inconvenient public witness is over. And this, according to The Bible, is the beginning of the world’s end.
What frightened me as a child was a world without witness, what concerns me as an adult is that I am watching the space for witness shrink because of our amnesia of how our rights are won. The child I was, was wrong about the content of the scripture but not its underlying principle. Of course I grew to believe that protest held the world together, how could I not? I was born into a civil war, my parents survived the massacre at Romero’s funeral, then went on to survive another one with me in tow. When the bullets started raining my mother placed her body on top of mine so that I would not be harmed. I was only six months old. Every formative political lesson in my life taught me that all that was needed to resist catastrophe was for people to bear witness.
As I watch the space for protest narrow and protestors characterised as existential threats to society, I still believe protest is duty. I still say a prayer every time I see someone bearing public witness. It’s this witness that keeps my hope alive, it is what fuels my personal and professional advocacy.
On 3 August 2025, I joined hundreds of thousands of my fellow sydneysiders as we marched over the Sydney Harbour Bridge for peace in Gaza. I marched in the cold and sideways rain with young people, old people, queer people, children, babies, religious, atheists, agnostics, and the unsure. I saw people praying, singing, dancing, demanding, shouting in the streets. This public witness reminded me that despite the threats to our rights and freedoms advancement still remains possible. Seeing the mass of humanity united gave me hope because despite the severity of NSW’s anti protests laws people still came. No one in the future looking back on this moment could say that we were silent and did nothing.
I’m more certain now than ever that as long as people gather there can only be hope. Those of us on that bridge were not only demanding a different future, we were participating in a tradition that stretches backwards through every struggle that bequeathed the rights and freedoms we inherited. We would do well to remember that every human right that we inherited was once a demand before it was consensus.
To celebrate our progress truthfully and completely is to also celebrate the public witness that made it possible, advancement requires memory as well as action. As a child, protest was reassurance to me that the world was still holding, as an adult I believe that the world is still holding because people are protesting
