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Buy Nothing Day 1997:
Report from Australia
From: Rodney Vlais Date: Sun, 7 Dec 1997 Subject: BND in OzG'day, fellow culture jammers!BND this year was disappointing in Oz. While it is hard for me to know what happened overall - Australia is a very big country - it seemed as though that the level activity was less than last year. There were only two street actions that I know of, which is not good enough for a country with approx. 18 million people.
What I do know occurred was:
- Two national radio interviews on our non-commercial national broadcaster - ABC - (which I did) - the Morning Show on Triple J (which is the youth station), and the national evening show.
- There may have been coverage on 2WS - a commercial radio station targetting the huge population of Western Sydney. An interview was recorded with a BND colleague but I don't know if it went to air.
- In Perth, a radio interview with the local ABC drive-time program was postponed due to cricket coverage - the interview was done on Dec 3 re Christmas and consumerism and mentioned BND only in the introductions.
- In Perth, four of us (including a performing Green Man) set up a stall in a busy shopping area in the port town (really a suburb of Perth) of Fremantle, giving out flyers and Christmas Gift Exemption Vouchers, with a sign "Shop till You Drop? Our Souls and the Planet are Dying". No media attended.
- In Brisbane ... "We were refused permission to have an information stall in the Queen Street Mall, in the centre of the City due to `a lack of space'. We decided to have a mobile information stall, us! Between 5 and 8 people throughout the day cruised the Mall and surrounding streets, with shopping trolleys covered in BND posters, with our BND T-shirts and handing out info encouraging people to think about their shopping habits. We gave away hundreds of leaflets, stickers and posters, much to the distress of the Mall managers! We escaped unharmed, except for a bit of sunburn. I wore a foot on my head that said `How big is you ecological footprint?', a concept which was a trifle obscure to the shoppers, but it amused me and attracted their attention! We also placed stickers around the place `Consume Less..Live More' etc."
There were also many individuals who did their own thing, such as putting up posters.
Looking forward to a bigger effort next year.
For Earth,
Rodney Vlais
Australia
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