One of the largest protests in Australian history. Entire Harbour Bridge covered in people.
I can’t believe the size of that crowd. It’s actually nerve wracking to think of that many people so close together, but good on them for showing how serious they are about ending support for this odious genocide.
The police getting them to turn around seemed like it risked crowd crush even more, but I’m no expert on crowd dynamics. It definitely looks like more than 100k people to me though.
Not an expert either but I’ve been to rallies with a conservative estimate of 30k and this was easily several times larger from only what I could see.
The police actually asked people to stay put and await further instructions. Apparently their plan was to stagger the crowd back. But one people couldn’t progress north any further every one just turned back anyway. It was all quite orderly, thankfully.
But one people couldn’t progress north any further every one just turned back anyway.
My experience on the ground was that it seemed people at the very north end of the march actually were told by police to start going back - or at least given a message that could be interpreted that way. Nobody at my part of the march started moving south again until people started coming back from the north end saying that we’d been told to go back. I could be wrong about all this, but if there’s any truth to that interpretation of events then we might hear more about it in the next few days.
Maybe they were just afraid of 100k+ people turning up to the US Embassy.
Letters in the Sydney Morning Herald include seem to align with my experience of events: https://www.instagram.com/p/DM9IfNwzD5o/
There’s no FOMO, there’s no reward for continuing on when you the people in front of you slow down, or you’ve been told to turn around.
There’s specific mentalities that contribute to crowd crush events and an organized peace march just doesn’t have that.
Also not an expert, just hyper fixated on disasters for awhile and crowd crushes and similar “stampede” events were a solid week of videos, papers, and news articles.
