I am not a fan of protests.

 I really don’t see the point of marching up and down, blocking streets and shouting, especially when recently a TV reporter asked a group of young women the reason they were protesting and they really couldn’t give an answer.

Even so, way back –  I did… just once…

I felt very strongly that there should be no uranium mining at Kakadu, very much so… and it turned out that Bob Hawke, our Prime Minister at the time, (tells you how long ago this was,) was going to some big conference near my workplace.

I decided to protest.

I grabbed a big poster from my office wall – if I recall, it either had breeds of horses or cattle on it – turned it over, grabbed a big, black texta and wrote KEEP OUT OF KAKADU or something else equally intelligent, stuck it under my arm and rushed to the place our PM was to be.

I joined a large group waiting for his arrival, and as I waited for him I learned a lot about protesting. Yes, there ARE people who are professional protesters.

We were coached on where to stand, what to yell and when… not what I innocently expected back then. A small grey-haired lady stood next to me chatting. She seemed sweet, and had her own sign…

So. The PM turned up… TV cameras go on and we chanted as instructed… little grey-haired lady nudged me and said “Dear, your sign is upside down”. Oops. I said I wasn’t good at this… lucky it wasn’t backwards so I suppose at least I wasn’t making him wonder why the tall red head was waving a large poster with various breeds of cows on it…

Then – the little grey haired lady surprised me even more – as the cameras swung round on us, she said “oh dear!” and dived behind me… adding that she was on a good behaviour bond from the last protest she went to.

Wow… I realised I was out of my depth.

So, really, I don’t know that I achieved anything… except to note that Bob Hawke was much shorter than he looked on TV…  But maybe I did – they didn’t mine Kakadu.

I went back to work, stuck the poster back on the wall… and decided that protesting was something I had no talent for.