SIB Audio: The Old Protester Guy
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OK, before we get to the audio, here's the story!

A couple of us guys (Chris, Daniel, Eric, Graham and Kerin to be exact) went to Riverside Park on Australia Day 2002 coz we wanted to see Mental As Anything doing a free concert.  We get there & sit down to listen to a group of girls singing (pretty good actually!) while Graham and Kerin decide to go walkabouts.  After about 20 minutes, the Mayor gets up to do a speech and hand out Australia Day awards to various community members.

Anyway, just as the Mayor was getting into his speech this old Ned Kelly-looking bushie guy gets up under a tree to the side of the stage with an Australian flag and starts raving about political shit.  "John Howard's a facist" and "Agree to the referendum" and shit like that.  People were getting pretty pissed off with him, telling him to shut up, but he was only making use of his right to free speech so nobody could do anything about it.

That is, until he poured petrol all over the flag and lit it up.  A couple of coppers who had been watching him went over and must have told him to "come down to the station" or something because he went right off his head.  He ended up being dragged away with policemen and security guards carrying his arms and legs.

We thought we'd seen the end and it was starting to piss down in buckets so we decided to pack up and head for the car.  Graham and Kerin were still walking around somewhere so we went back to find them, but there, 15 minutes later, the handcuffed protester guy was still being held down in the wet dirt by a copper while they were waiting for the paddy wagon.  He had kicked out the window of the police car they put him in!

And here, my friends, is where Chris turned on his tape recorder with the guy still crapping on and a crowd of about 70 people watching him!

So there you go.  The actual recording went longer than that, mind you (about 6 minutes), but I cut a lot of silence and non-contributing talk from it because of storage restrictions on Geocities. And in case you wanted to know, we didn't stay for Mental As Anything either because of the poor weather so we went and had Pizza Hut instead.

But we all agreed that it was worth turning up just to see this halfwit try to get away with what he had done.  "Unlawful arrest!" he reckons.   Yeah, right, man - you lit up the fucking Australian flag in public and then argued about it with the authorities!  Looks like his first lesson in free speech didn't quite go as planned, hey!

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