Sean Scalmer

Over the last four decades, publicity stunts, demonstrations and audacious displays of moral commitment have become an increasingly familiar part of political life. Within Australia, these have ranged from the pioneering efforts of Student Action For Aborigines, to the campaign against the Vietnam War, and a cluster of social movements organised around gender, race and sexuality. Crucial to these developments has been a persistent interplay between protest action and the media. But how do protesters attract the media's attention, what are the costs of this emphasis on theatre and spectacle, and how does the emergence of the Internet complicate and enrich the means of collective protest? Dissent Events: Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia offers a contemporary history of collective action in Australia over the last four decades, from the halting experiments of the early sixties, to more recent actions involving Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, the quest for reconciliation, and the anti-corporate campaigners of the S11 Alliance. It tells the story of these performances, develops a set of concepts to analyse their changing form and illuminates the larger story of social and political change in recent Australian life.

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