The Pine Gap Four

By Stuart Rees

( June 17^th 2007)

By moonlight over the sands and through the scrub

a man and a woman from one direction,

another man and a woman from the other,

enter Pine Gap, armed only

with the beauty of their courage

to show that non violent disobedience

has never harmed anyone.

Defeated by the failure of democracy

to halt this latest licence for the military,

they climb the domes of secrecy,

this gadgetry for spies and spying,

for propping an unholy alliance

and for targeting innocents

in a far away land.

Moved by centuries of momentum

behind protests for justice,

they raise the flags of peace

and explain to the belted and the badged,

there must be an alternative

to harming a fragile earth,

to killing in the name of freedom.

Primed only by their certainty

an army of barristers then fires at a jury

their lore that security needs violence,

that there can be no alternative to dictats

which feed from the pollution of war

and no alternative

to convicting the Pine Gap Four.

* Outside The Department of Defence

by Stuart Rees

(June 17^th 2007)

On an early morning cold

behind the broad glass doors,

his tripod steady as a gun turret,

a well dressed operative fingers

his Defence Department camera,

peers into the viewfinder and aims

at the pavement=s banner holders

protesting more rehearsals for war.

He films sixty protesters

against sixty thousand soldiers

about to bomb mock villages and villagers,

this latest military madness

to be camouflaged as defence

but blue serge security legions,

the robots of risk reduction,

are guarding the man with the camera,

their arms folded, legs apart,

boots anchored, faces lost to happiness,

their bodies dressed

by a rationality connected

to the goosesteps of another age.

They have been ordered to watch

these protesters striving

to touch the wellsprings of their passions

for the record,

before this camera,

on a sidewalk

before commuters

on a cold morning

outside the Department of Defence.

* Commemorating the June 15^th peace protest against the Talisman Sabre defence exercises in North Queensland.