This zine tells the story of an autonomous act undertaken by a Blak anarchist in solidarity with Palestine, some repressive consequences for the actionist, and a subsequent solidarity event raising funds to support them

www.backlashblogs.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/the-anti-colonial-pacific-zine/

Backlash Returns

It returns, because the noise did not cease. Because the spectacle, in its endless convulsion, demands not our commentary but our interference. For a year, we were silent—a silence not of absence, but of a withdrawal into the thickness of the world. To speak into the digital void, when the ground itself is screaming, felt for a time like a betrayal of the real. An apology? We offer none. The pause was necessary. To listen to the cracks forming, not in the discourse, but in the pavement.

While this page lay fallow, the Australian settlement continued its pantomime of governance and its frenzy of extraction. Let us recount not ‘news’, but symptoms.

The Fires Continued.

Not the bushfires of memory, but the slow, sanctioned burn of a society against itself. The cost-of-living became a tool of discipline, a deliberate squeeze to turn neighbours into competitors for crumbs. Rents are not rising; they are a weapon of displacement. The supermarket duopoly does not have high prices; it administers a private tax on existence. This is not an economy; it is an ecology of predation.

They offered you a ‘Voice’, and framed it as a gift. They staged a referendum not to empower, but to exhaust. To channel a century-long cry for country into the sterile circuits of a campaign, to be defeated by a ghost army of scarecancers. The lesson was not about recognition, but about the state’s final, absolute refusal to hear what cannot be translated into its own language of ownership and law. The land mourns, and they offer a parliamentary committee.

The federal election

The vote was a séance, a desperate summoning of the ghost of opposition to lay to rest a spectre of our own making. They told us: hold your nose, mark the ballot, save the nation from its Dutton-Trump reflection. And so we did, and in the landslide we drowned. Now we survey the pacified terrain: Albo’s grin, the acceptable face of the same machine, velvet-gloved where the other threatened a fist. The unions, those tired bureaucracies of compromise, are now metabolized organs of the state-apparatus, smoothing the passage of capital while chanting hollow anthems of solidarity. To outvote the monster was only to invite it home, to welcome it in through the ministerial doors, to let it speak in the measured, reasonable tones of a neoliberal manager. The crisis was never Trumpian; it is the very grammar of governance, the bi-partisan liturgy of dispossession. Our ‘victory’ is the quiet hum of the grinding machine, newly polished, newly legitimized by our own complicit hands. The chasm is not before us; it is the space between what we were promised and the prison of managed decline we so enthusiastically built for ourselves.

The Wars Came Home.

Not with troops, but with words. The violence in Gaza stripped the paint from every public institution. Universities revealed themselves as factories of compliance, desperate to silence the solidarity of the young. In response, the Minns “solution”: not to address the cause of the cry, but to surgically remove the right to cry in public. His protest bans are the logic of the manager applied to despair—a zoning law for dissent. The police, whose purpose is now clear, rushed to protect the feelings of the powerful and the flow of traffic, not the bodies of the vulnerable or the urgency of conscience. A great sorting occurred, in real time.

While the state moved to silence one form of assembly, it nervously eyed another. The “March for Australia”—a parade of racist kitsch, a therapy session for the impotent, dressed in the sad iconography of a white frontier they are not a resurgence, but a spasm. The true danger is not their pathetic theatre, but the larger machinery of exclusion whose polite language they vomit forth in crude slogans. They are the id of the border regime, grinning and stupid. Their fear is a commodity; their anger, a product. With new terror laws resulting in the alleged “disbanding” of the NSN, the state, having cut the head from the most venomous snake, now watches as its poison seeps into the broader body.

The Climate is Not ‘Changing’—It is Escaping. It flees every model, shatters every ‘transition’ timeline peddled by the renewables-industrial complex. They speak of ‘becoming a renewable superpower’ as if it were a new frontier for the same colonial plunder. The heat does not negotiate. The floods do not vote. A profound, unspoken realisation is taking hold: no one is coming to save us. The apparatus is not for saving; it is for managing the catastrophe, for deciding who will be sheltered and who will be sacrificed.

So, we return. Not as commentators, but as cartographers of the collapse. Not to ‘report’, but to trace the lines of force, the points of failure, the emergent forms of desertion and attack. Backlash was always meant to be a name for the recoil, the inevitable resistance against the machine that seeks to grind all life into data and profit.

In the archive of this silence, texts accumulated. Reports from the front lines, communiqués from the cracks, analyses that arrived like letters during a postal strike. We will now, deliberately, post these outdated submissions. Not because they are ‘news’, but because they are evidence. They are the murmurs from before the bans, the diagnostics of the fever before the temperature broke. They form a prehistory of our present, a catalogue of the tensions that have only since snapped into public view. Read them as maps of a terrain that was shifting beneath our feet, and which has now opened into chasms.

The blog is a tool. A flawed one. A megaphone left in a street. It is here again. Use it to find each other. To sharpen the critique that precedes the action. The silence is broken. Let it be broken by a different noise.

http://backlashblogs.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/backlash-returns

Check out the new zine Reflections on the Campaign to Disrupt Land Forces

https://backlashblogs.wordpress.com/2025/02/07/reflections-on-the-campaign-to-disrupt-land-forces-new-zine/

https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/australian-police-top-global-list-in-terms-of-arresting-climate-defenders/

IT'S OFFICIAL

A NEW STUDY SHOWS AUSTRALIA IS NUMBER ONE WHEN IT COMES TO ARRESTING ENVIRONMENTAL
ACTIVISTS

THIS COMES AS NO SHOCK TO THOSE WHO'VE BEEN TARGETED, HARASSED AND REPRESSED BY THE STATE.

While Arrest rates are the HIGHEST globally, environmental protestors have not disappeared or been murdered like is prevalent in Brazil, the Philippines, India and Peru.

The system here will do what it can get AWAY with; slowly dismantling any protection or freedom to protest arresting and repressing wherever possible.

VICTORIA PLANS TO BAN THE USE OF GLUE, ROPES, LOCKS, CHAINS AND FACE MASKS. THE STATE IS ALSO BANNING THE FLYING OF FLAGS FROM ORGANISATIONS THEY CONSIDER AS "TERRORISTS", WHICH WE KNOW CAN RANGE FROM DIRECT ACTION TO ACTS OF EXTREME VIOLENCE.

This follows a swathe of ANTI protest laws implemented in the last few years, particularly in SA. NSW and QLD. In the last two DECAEDS. 49 laws affecting protest have been introduced in Australia: as detailed in the 'Protest in Peril' report.

The STATE continues to show how FAR They're willing to go to LOCK Up and silence Activists taking ACTION against the System.

THE MORE POWER WE TAKE FROM THEM, THE MORE POWER THEY TRY TO TAKE FROM US.

It's Important WE take care of each other. the more we RESIST the more they will try isolate and Remove us from our communities.

Together we have Power in our Networks. we must never Conform to their System and need to Collectively take action Against the perpetrators of Ecocide and all States.

New zine How to Topple a Colonial Statue please print and distribute

https://backlashblogs.wordpress.com/2024/09/23/new-zine-how-to-topple-a-colonial-statue/