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Visions Of Freedom anarchist conference and festival, Sydney, Australia. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ january 21st and 22nd, 1995. ---------------------------- Somewhere between three and four hundred people attended the conference/festival over this weekend. Anarchists and other interested people came from all round australia and a few from overseas. Because it was only on for two days, there was a very crowded program of workshops and other events. During the times where the conference was organized into workshops, there were 5 different ones running at the same time. This covered about half the time the main conference part ran for. The workshops that were organized beforehand were as follows. Anarchy and feminism. Self-determination and anti-imperialism. Anarchy and ecology. Anarchism or barbarism. Anarcho-syndicalism and privatisation. Policing, crime and social control. Providing tools and training for self-reliance. Gay, lesbian and trans-gender politics. Militarism and social defence. Bookshops stalls and information distribution. Anarchist organization. Anarcho-syndicalism strategy and organization. Critique of recent sydney anarchist practice. Anarchist media. Class post the berlin wall. HEMP campaign. Confederation and building common campaigns. Victorian tramway dispute. As well as these, the following workshops happened spontaneously. Country anarchists. Men's movement. There were three book launches: <<Bomber grounded, runway closed>> by Ciaron O'Reilly, <<Hemp and the marijuana conspiracy>> by Jack Herer, two books by Graham Purchase: <<My journey with aristotle to anarchist utopia>> and <<Anarchism and environmental survival>>. Also, my book <Message sticks in cyberspace>> was quietly put on sale for the first time and a new booklet in spanish and english of a letter from Marcos (mexican zapatista revolutionary) was available. During the whole of the daytime part of the conf/fest, there was a small computer centre set up and running, with internet connections intermittently available and the entire Spunk press archive available for people to obtain either disk or paper copies of some or all of the material. There were several people there to answer questions and pass on information about the anarchist computer network and other issues related to computer comunications. Alfalfa House, a local food co-op provided good cheap vegan food during the two days. On friday night there was a free dance party which most of the people at the gathering went to. There was also a video festival happening during the two days which i didn't manage to get to at all, as it was in a different building. Black Rose and Jura, sydney's anarchist bookshops had bookstalls. A special conference edition of the Brisbane quarterly paper <<the anarchist>> was available too. I didn't get to any workshops (except the <<country anarchists>> one) because i was mainly tied up around the computer stuff, but there should be reports happening from other people who did. But i did go to the so-called <<plenary>> session at the end, where the conference was more or less summed up by delegates from each workshop. The most striking impression i got from the plenary session was that, sadly, the anarcist movement in australia still hasn't come to terms with women's issues and sexuality issues. No matter what complacent self-back-patting goes on, the male heterosexual elements of our mob still dominates everything with it's old pervasive self-obsessed patriarchal arrogance. The anarchy and feminism workshop was probably the best attended of the whole event, with about a hundred people. This shows it's a very important subject in the minds of a large proportion of anarchists. But still the men couldn't keep their big mouths shut and listen for a change. Sadly and disgustingly, the discussion on anarcha-feminst issues was dominated, just like everything else, by heterosexual male fear of losing their place in the pecking order. Hopefully in future, these fools will be thrown out of such workshops as soon as they open their mouths. If they support feminist politics, they should be there to listen and learn - if they don't they shouldn't be there at all. The gay, lesbian and trans-gender politics workshop was also fucked up by the pathetic closet-scared bullshit of this same type of 'anarchist' heterosexual males. The patronising attitude shown by a certain old fool towards the subject of s&m, illustrated this problem very well. He was attempting to preach some wanky psychological crap to people who spend a large part of their lives thinking seriously about this stuff - from the perspective of experience and in relation to their totally valid anarchist politics. The end of the conference was an unfortunate come-down after a succesful couple of days. But it reminded us of probably the most important thing we have to deal with if we're ever going to take our politics to a point where they can *really* change the world - the thoughtless, fearful, arrogant domination of the movement by white heterosexual males (of which, i hate to admit, i'm one!) will