Michael,

Apologies for the delayed reply. I had missed it. I appreciate the clarity - and I genuinely mean that, because this reply confirms that your original article wasn’t just symbolic or emotionally reflective. It was revisionist history, written to elevate a fringe protest into a defining civic moment, despite what actually happened during that time.

You now say, plainly, that you believe COVID “was never a real pandemic” but merely a propaganda exercise. That belief puts you outside the realm of public health debate and deep into conspiracy territory. A pandemic that killed over 7 million people globally - and left many millions more with chronic illness - was not imaginary, nor was it a psy-op. It was a real, complex, global emergency.

The fact that you place greater faith in a handful of protesters than in the vast weight of global scientific, epidemiological, and public health expertise says everything.

As for who “had it right” - Premier Andrews or the protesters - the answer isn’t found in crowd size. 150,000 people can march for a cause. That doesn’t make it correct. There were huge crowds who supported Brexit. Or Trump. Or the invasion of Iraq. Large numbers don’t equal moral clarity, especially when whipped up by misinformation.

Sky News, Rowan Dean, and similar voices were not censored. They were platformed, daily, by some of the largest media conglomerates in the world. You don’t get to hold a megaphone in a stadium and then say you were silenced because the crowd didn’t all clap.

You’re free to honour whoever you like. But calling a modest, unauthorised protest the modern equivalent of Thermopylae doesn’t bring clarity. It brings distortion.

That’s not honour. That’s historical cosplay.

Paul1405
Thanks for reminding us about the Eureka Stockade, a central moment in defining our national character. Whenever we see the Eureka flag unfurled, it’s usually a sign that our government is once again shafting someone through one of their short-sighted and ill-conceived ventures.

Given the government’s heavy-handed response during COVID, the Eureka Stockade might well have served as a fitting symbol of resistance against authoritarian imposition. But for my article, having travelled to Greece last year, it was Leonidas and his Spartan warriors who came most vividly to front of mind.

As you suggest, Paul, COVID marked the first time society has tried to cure the common cold with totalitarianism instead of chicken noodle soup. You can only laugh when the supermarket was emptying the shelves of cans of soup, as too people were using them to get over COVID, rather than taking the prescribed jab.

Jokes aside, during the anti-lockdown protest on 21 August 2021, Victoria Police used firearms against civilian protesters for the first time since the Eureka Stockade in 1854. That day, photographer Matt Lawson was the first protester struck by a police-fired projectile in modern Australian history. From the film footage seen in the documentary Battleground Melbourne (https://battlegroundmelbourne.com/), it seemed Matt Lawson was fired upon for no reason other than a display of force by VicPol.

Following that, precisely four years ago today, 22 September 2021 is the day Victoria Police again fired rubber bullets to disperse peaceful demonstrators at The Shrine. And also, this was the same day we experienced an extremely unusual magnitude 5.9 earthquake, one of the largest earthquakes recorded in the state, adding an eerie layer to an already turbulent day. A rather strange period of our history.

Michael Viljoen

Hi Michael,

I suppose there are two sides to every story. A bit of irony when it comes to Eureka, those protesting authoritarian action against themselves, simmering tensions over gold prospecting licences and heavy handed action by police in enforcing the law. The same Europeans involved in Eureka were calling for stronger government action against the Chinese on the gold fields.

My experience with police violence goes back to my teenage days, and the Vietnam War protests. Police removing their badges before "arresting" passive protesters, using excessive force, and then laying trumped up charges, all politically motivated.

I was given a business card some time back by a fella I know. He claimed there was no Covid, and the vaccine was a mind controlling drug, it was all down to the work of the Illuminati. I thought he was a bit strange.

Michael,

I'm a little surprised to see you run with Paul’s comment so literally. His nod to the Eureka Stockade was laced with irony - especially his postscript about “no actual Aussies.” Your reply, though, treats it like a solemn baton-passing of national symbolism, alongside Thermopylae, Leonidas, and now a pandemic-era soup shortage.

The result is something closer to folk myth than historical reflection.

Your article already recast a modest protest as a symbolic act of national salvation. Now, you’ve added Eureka and even an earthquake for effect. It’s powerful storytelling, but not exactly rigorous history.

COVID wasn’t “the common cold.” It killed over 20,000 Australians and millions globally, overwhelmed ICUs, and left tens of thousands with long-term complications. No serious public health body in the world treated it like a seasonal nuisance, nor did chicken soup make a dent in transmission rates.

As for police tactics - yes, rubber bullets were used on 21 of August and again on 22nd September. That should be debated. But to equate that with Eureka - a fatal armed uprising - is to confuse civil disobedience with armed insurrection. And the fact that later protests attracted thousands without similar escalation suggests the early incidents were the exception, not the rule.

Finally, you again raise censorship - while referencing a widely distributed film, multiple media outlets, and now publishing freely here. If suppression was the goal, it failed spectacularly.

Discourse isn’t censorship, and myth isn’t memory. It’s perfectly fine to challenge the COVID response, but romanticising it into a legend of the 300 or Eureka doesn’t honour truth. It replaces it.

John Daysh,
I'm curious. You've just said, 'Finally, you again raise censorship'.

When in my last post did I raise censorship 'again'?

Let me try and understand your reasoning. If there’s a only a little or a lot of cencorship, you’re saying that the cencorship is not real, because it’s not totally successful.

So, for argument’s sake, if Facebook censors people in an unreasonable manner, and so people head off to ‘X’ to get their information in an uncencorerd manner, then that would mean that the Facebook cencorship wasn’t real, because the information wasn’t totally restricted but available elsewhere.

Is that what you’re suggesting?

I’ve never said that the cencorship was total, only that it was real.