Perspectives on Occupy Melbourne (OM): solidarity, security, spectacle

Occupy Melbourne (OM) took place between 15 and 21 October 2011 at City Square, Melbourne,11 The social semiotics of City Square within Melbourne are fascinating: it is the material remainder of failed attempts at the constitution of a civic space in Melbourne's centre in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and now exists in the permanent shadow of the Westin hotel. It is bordered on one side by one of the tackiest stretches of Swanston St, by two roads (Collins Street and Flinders Lane) and on the Westin Hotel side, by a number of food retail establishments, notably Starbucks (which, interestingly, did not become a key object of protest). Readers unfamiliar with Melbourne are encouraged to take a moment to study the location of City Square in relation to Swanston Street and Federation Square using Google Maps. View all notes in solidarity with the series of Occupy protests that took place in the US and Britain around the same time, and that are notionally ongoing on an indefinite basis. OM was a proclamation of solidarity and a protest against inequality that involved occupying urban – apparently public – space for an indefinite period of time. This was done as an exercise in direct democracy, explicitly in order to generate encounters in which: concerns about the greed and inequality generated by finance capital could be shared; the injustices of the self-centred, atomistic societal cultures to which it has given rise across the world could be named, described and criticized; and the shock impacts characteristic of this conjuncture might be transformed into a shared narrative whose ‘moral of the story’ might point out, as in the late 1990s, that ‘another world was possible’. OM, in sum, was the wannabe that wished to be – and might have been – the starting point for all this. It is totally intelligible both in terms of its own proclamation and the ambient non-recognition of those claims by society. OM's emergence and dispersion is recalled here briefly for the fascinating things it can tell us about the status and meaning of solidarity, security and spectacle, and how that shapes public space, both in contemporary Melbourne and as a sign and symbol of more general transformations.