Comparing ‘Selma’ and ‘Newcastle’

(1) Rich cultural backgrounds for audiences who are ‘reading’ the story

Both ’Selma’ and ’Newcastle’ occurred against a rich cultural background or ‘horizon’ of historical experience and cultural identity. 

The interaction between cultural horizon, ’script’ and overall message is important for political communication: it affects whether the drama really ‘strikes a chord’ in audiences. 

Following the successful third march from Selma, King spoke on the steps of the capitol at Montgomery. He evoked themes including: ’the realization of the American dream’; ‘moving to the land of freedom’; and ’the arc of the moral universe’; and he quoted from the antislavery anthem, Battle Hymn of the Republic.

For several observers, the blockade evoked ‘David and Goliath’. In The Guardian, the blockade was dubbed the ‘David versus Goliath campaign of the year’ in an assessment of ’the ‘Top 10 sustainability campaigns of 2014’. 

Others drew the same ‘David and Goliath’ parallel. 

Grounding in Pacific traditions was also fundamental to the Warriors’ campaign. 350 Pacific Coordinator Koreti Tiumalu explained: 

The idea behind the canoes is about connecting the past with the present. It’s about showing that our Pacific Island communities have been living sustainably off the land for generations, and that we are now being affected by climate change. Our key message is around saying that ‘We’re not drowning, we’re fighting.’ We want to stand up for the Pacific…

Our idea is to share and use our traditional knowledge of our warrior history to be able to help guide us in how we can change and heal what is happening to our islands today. Those canoes and how they have been built are symbolic of a people who are desperate to stand together and do something in a way we’ve never done before, but to use those traditional skills and knowledge as a way to tell that story.

It is easy to imagine that the Warriors had a powerful effect on audiences in the Pacific. Yet maybe the lack of a rich Australian cultural horizon in Warriors’ message limited the potential to strike a chord with Australian audiences? (In the way that the Aboriginal Tent Embassy did, or in the way that Selma did in the US).

(2) Enacting the civil rights movement’s ‘plot-line’

In Selma, ‘actors’ were re-enacting an existing plot-line involving a predictable but powerful sequence of events: King wrote:

Long years of experience indicated to us that Negroes could achieve this goal when four things occured:

1. nonviolent demonstrators go into the streets to exercise their constitutional rights;

2. racists resist by unleashing violence against them;

3. Americans of good conscience in the name of decency demand federal intervention and legislation;

4. the administration, under mass pressure, initiates measures ofimmediate intervention and supports remedial legislation.

For the Pacific Warriors, the slower consequences of climate change were harder to establish in a dramatic way, although dramatic photographs were taken, and events such as the king tides in the Marshall Islands immediately beforehand pointed to what was at stake. 

(3) Selma – a sustained drama

Key events in the Selma campaign unfolded over a period of months in the public eye. By contrast, although the Pacific Warriors’ ’script’ spanned many months, only the events of a single day became widely known. In this sense, what happened in Newcastle—for most of the Australian ’audience’—was a ’one-scene play’, and a richer dramatic sequence was visible only to those who followed the events more closely. 

The images generated in the case of Selma were charged in a way that drew in the public and demanded a response from politicians. These included the violence depicted in images that conveyed the reality of racism in the US. 

(4) What will happen next?

A dramatic sense of ‘what will happen next?’ was not strong for the Warriors’ broad Australian audience. Selma featured charismatic leaders—as did the Pacific Warriors—however in the case of Selma, many of them were nationally well-known, whereas most of the ’characters’ at Newcastle were being introduced to Australians for the first time. Their personal stories were known only to those who followed the events closely. 

(5) Authenticity

The Pacific Warriors brought to climate campaigning not just a political ideology or a mobilised network, but also a sense of authenticity: the dangers are real, the people they affect are real, and these people were confronting the real cause of the problem.  

(6) Continuing an existing ‘wave’ / starting a new one

Importantly in terms of political impact, Selma represented the ’crest’ of a ’wave’ of civil rights movement activity, building on substantial existing political momentum. The civil rights movement had strong existing community support—the result of a ‘wave’ that had been building for years. For almost all Australians, the Newcastle blockade was the first time the Pacific Warriors were appearing on the scene. 

(7) Creating a sense of crisis

Further, campaigners at Selma were able to precipitate a national crisis—something far beyond the aims of the Pacific Warriors. As quoted in the analysis of Selma, Martin Luther King wrote about ‘creat[ing] such a crisis and establish[ing] such creative tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue’ and dramatising the issue so that ‘it can no longer be ignored’. 

Creating this kind of crisis depends not just on theatrical skill and existing perceptions of the issues, but also on the stability and strength of existing power relationships. Unlike the US civil rights movement, the Pacific Warriors were beginning a new ‘wave’. They drew attention to the links between coal, climate change and Australia, however the wave would need to build for the event to turn into a national political turning point in Australia. 

Yet it was more of a turning point within the Pacific: see The Pacific Warriors: what did they really achieve?