Day 4 - Riots

Short introduction. In Australia there have been many incidents about land claims. Before the British settlement int the late 18th century Australia was inhabitet by Aboriginals. The two oppositions have had and still have problem with claims of pieces of land.
My ' employer' (Thor) is doing research about how the media pictures the Aboriginals as a very aggresive group of people, while they are (in my experience) not. Yesterday we joined a protest of Aboriginals against forced closure of their camps. After the protest we got an assingnemt to write a scientific documentation of the event by the perspective of a neutral source. I thought it would be a good idea to combine the blog with this assignment, so here it is:

11:00
Beginning of the protest at the forest square. What struck was that there were many sorts of people; non-aboriginals, students, anonymous, elderly and even little kids.

11:20
Traditional Aboriginal dance (ceremonial)

11:30-12:00
Speeches

12:05
Beginning of the walk through the town towards the parliament house of West-Australia

12:05-12:40
During the walk the number of policemen grows significantly.
Continous chants e.g. ' This was, this will be, Aboriginal land'
Both the protestors, especially the Aboriginal leaders and the policemen were getting more and more aggresive towards each other. It looked like the police targeted the leaders who were emotionally unstable and had a short temper.

12:20
The motorcyclist is driving in the middle of a group of protestors. The motorcyclist started to drive faster and hit a woman. This concerns ll policemen; they all were very close to the protestors.
Some leaders started to calm down the protestors and tried to tell them to stay away from and to stop provoking the police.

12:30
The police were very close to the protestors in particular one cavalry policeman. The horse got surrounded by protestors and the horse and policeman started to panic, because of the the horse started to run forwardand step on a man (luckily the horse only stepped on his leg.)

12:30
After a lot of chaos one leader stepped up and try to calm down the protestors using his speech. He said that the protestors should ignore the police.

12:40
We arrived at parliament house, the were many news channels. There already were protestors at the parliament house. The first thing I picked up was the number of policemen.

13:00
Man ' attacks' police and gets arrested. I didn't see him attacking the policeman, but only saw him touching him on the shoulder. The policemen grabbed the man very aggresive and one policeman fell in the process of doing that.

13:10
Someone of the parliament gets hand over the petition and has a small speech.

13:45
Protest finished