This article examines the political administration of humour in Australian civil society from both an historical and contemporary perspective, as well as a range of cases involving cross-dressing prostitutes, police impersonators, political satirists and rebellious bare-bottomed colonial prisoners. Why are these moments of cheerful vulgarity met with dour repression on the part of police? How does a lack of humour on the part of police reflect on the freedoms of the citizenry?
Nesster, Clown Routine, 2006
Certains droits réservés.
It was a Saturday night when Annie Britton, famed member of the demi-monde, “decorated her person with military accoutrements” and strolled down the main street in Melbourne, Australia. To be precise, it was ten-thirty at night January 25th, 1873, and Annie stepped on to the pavement from her “house of ill-fame” dressed in little more than an officer’s sword, belt and cocked hat. According to The Argus, she had “an umbrella on her shoulder and a cigar in her mouth.” Constable Thompson, a diligent officer with a keen sense of propriety, was amongst the crowd. “Annie Britton!” he called after her, “Where did you get your sword?” “Ask Captain Gillibee!” she retorted. “And where is Captain Gillibee?” Eyes twinkling, sucking impetuously on her cigar she replied: “He is up at my place.” Constable Thompson was not amused. He promptly arrested Annie and was surprised to find her completely sober. She appeared to be acting, he later reported, “in a spirit of bravado.” Where Captain Gillibee suffered the ignominy of a dishonourable discharge, Annie was sentenced to one months’ imprisonment with hard labour1.
Over a century later, state authorities remain po-faced when confronted with the likes of Annie. Those who mock figures of authority are met by dour and censorious police whose folded arms and furrowed brows are enshrined in legislation. In Sydney two women, Sarah Harrison (27) and Anika Vinson (24) appeared in court in July 2007 facing charges related to impersonating police officers; an offence which carries a maximum penalty of seven years imprisonment. The women were arrested after sashaying their way through a Dick Cheney protest in late February dressed in blue mechanic’s overalls, caps sparkling with glittery checked ‘disco’ ribbon, fake handlebar moustaches and holding either cardboard guns or bright purple fluffy novelty handcuffs. As part of the ‘Tranny Cops Dance Troupe’ they were deploying what they describe as a combination of “sick dance moves, lyrical bombs and rap” to create “an instance where it is safe to laugh at that kind of authority”2.
At the Cheney protests, however, their laughter was met with repression. “We were about to leave the protest, which only had around one hundred people there, when the police suddenly blocked off the road with a water cannon and five or eight police went for us separately,” Harrison explains. “We were taken to the police station where they stripped us to our jocks and gave us paper overalls to wear… After being held for five hours, we were released and …had to walk for an hour in bare feet and paper overalls to the nearest train station.” When queried why the police responded in such a manner, the women mused: “we must have been targeted as a strategy for crowd dispersal. They needed to have some arrests to justify such a massive deployment of police. And, of course, there’s the APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] conference coming up. I think they wanted to scare us off protesting”3.
From Annie Britton dressed as an officer casually twirling her parasol to the Tranny Cops performing tight synchronised dance moves, police throughout Australian history have kept a stern face. Rowdy spectacle and cheerful vulgarity have been met with a crushing, monolithic seriousness. It is a history of the triumph of order over imagination.
Indeed, the sombre countenance of authority is seen not only in relation to female impersonators, but anyone who combines rebellion with wit. During the APEC conference in Sydney, September 2007, Assistant Police Commissioner David Owens declared that he was not amused when two members of the satirical television show ‘The Chaser’ dressed as Osama bin Laden and staged a motorcade entering the conference4. With three black cars and men in black jogging alongside, the motorcade sliced through two police checkpoints arriving outside the Intercontinental Hotel where US President George Bush was staying. It was only when one of the men climbed out of the limousine looking like Osama bin Laden that police detected the security breach. The Chaser and their crew were frisked, arrested, detained and charged under section 19 of the APEC Meeting (Police Powers) Act 2007. Their Court hearing is set for March 2008. An official from the APEC Investigation Squad responded with characteristic sourness: “This is an extremely serious issue”, he said. “We’ve got the most serious, the biggest security operation in Australia’s history”5. The Assistant Police Commissioner agreed: “We have twenty one world leaders here and whilst I enjoy like everyone else a good laugh, this isn’t funny”6.
Almost one hundred years earlier, the Governor of Tasmania also declared that female prisoners flaunting authority and indeed the norms of feminine propriety was a decidedly unfunny affair. The Governor and his wife were, according to sources, “horrified and astounded” when three hundred female prisoners grew weary of his sermon and “turned right around and at one impulse pulled up their clothes shewing (sic) their naked posteriors which they simultaneously smacked with their hands making a not very musical noise.” According to a catechist’s report at the time, punitive sanction was evaded by the collective nature of the revolt as “all did the same act (thus) ringleaders could not be picked out”7.
On one level it could be argued that these examples of carnivalesque revolt and corresponding state repression reflect an age-old conflict within liberal politics: that between political freedoms, particularly the freedom of self-expression, and the demands of state security or public order. While the recently deposed Prime Minister John Howard told the Australian public that resolving this conflict involves a delicate balancing act, he tended to arbitrate as though playing a zero-sum game; where a dizzying increase in public order meant a crashing decrease in civil rights. But even suggesting that this conflict exists assumes two things: firstly, that Australia has a legally protected right to protest; and, secondly, that public order is imperilled.
Unlike the rest of the Western world, Australia has no Bill of Rights and has never had a prima facie right to demonstrate recognised by the law. Instead, as legal academic Roger Douglas writes, there is only “a series of limited immunities – freedoms that are not prohibited”8. Since the case of Levy v Victoria in the early 1990s, a constitutional right to protest may be read into our implied freedom of communication. But, according to the High Court, even this right can be limited by any law that is “reasonably appropriate and adapted to serve a legitimate end”9. It is not so much that our civil rights are being diminished. It is simply that they were never absolutely there in the first place.
As for the threat to public order, the Tranny Cops were arrested at a lawful demonstration with due notice given under the Summary Offences Act. The protest was at best peaceful and at worst, according to Harrison and Vinson, “just another boring socialist on the microphone”10. Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer also conceded that The Chaser stunt did not pose a threat to public safety. “The honest truth is they were not going to harm anybody in a physical way” he said11. In each case the invocation of public order seems to be a thinly veiled attack on our freedom of dissent, self-expression and mirth. A lack of humour on the part of the police justifies a lack of freedoms on the part of the citizenry. It is a humourlessness which political commentator David Marr claims to have reached dire proportions under the Howard government. “On a long list of Howard’s political achievements in the last decade,” he writes “the mood shift of the nation is perhaps the greatest. Wit disappeared”12.
The Australian government’s response to the demands of public order is completely disproportionate to the actual threat that a few middle-aged protestors represent. During his eleven years in power, John Howard’s response was as humourless as your average socialist and as hysterical as a Freudian patient. Phantasms of Dionysian disorder and pantomimes of insurrection were projected onto, what is ultimately, a complaisant and docile population. Today, protestors are still greeted with water cannons, mounted police and dog handlers. The streets are locked down. Police powers reach vertiginous heights. If democracy is at its essence a dialogue between the nation and its leaders then the last ten years can be seen as a concerted effort on the government’s part to kill the conversation.
This is not to suggest that all demands of public order are without merit or, to return to the case of the Tranny Cops, that police impersonators should be greeted with hearty laughter and slaps on the back. The Courts have rightly punished police impersonators on the grounds that people cannot play on the trust reposed in police by members of the public. This was the argument put forward by police in the Tranny Cops court hearing. The prosecution argued that the Tranny Cops had an intention to deceive and to exercise powers beyond their capacity, which in turn resulted in public confusion and disorder. Their arguments, however, appeared flimsy. It was claimed that the Tranny Cops uniform resembled that of the Victorian police and that their communication with people in cars constituted a false exercise of police powers. In response to the former claim, Magistrate David Helipern wryly asked whether all Victorian police uniforms have an anarchist symbol emblazoned across the chest, and the second claim was dismissed when Harrison was asked what she had said to the cars she approached: “I rocked back and forth with my fingers in my belt, pointed to the line of police and dogs blocking the road and told them to drive straight through the thin blue line” she said13.
Luckily, for Vinson and Harrison, wit and an appreciation of satire had not completely disappeared from the judiciary, with Magistrate Helipern dismissing all charges against the Tranny Cops. « Challenging figures of authority for the purpose of public protest is a reasonable excuse for the act of wearing a police uniform » the court held14. This was in spite of new legislation introduced in December 2006, which stated that police impersonators must prove that their performance was just play, or, in the words of the Act, “solely satirical” in order to escape hefty fines or imprisonment15.
While the police response to protestors in general can be seen to be humourless and repressive, it appears that cross-dressing females impersonating masculine figures of authority earns particular censure. Here we may return to Constable Thomas’ affront at seeing his own uniform on Annie Britton. More than breaching public order or threatening the peace, Annie Britton and the Tranny Cops were guilty of turning a uniform of the state into a piece of carnivalesque drag. The armour of authority became an artifice of authority and power slid deliciously into performance.
While Annie Britton’s sentence of one month imprisonment with hard labour may seem typical of a Dickensian era lacking the freedoms and rights we enjoy today, it appears that in Australia such freedoms were always precarious and are becoming ever more anachronistic. Protestors are met with repression and face jail terms that make Annie’s seem mild by comparison. A robust democracy needs a government with a better sense of humour; one which values self-expression, accepts dissent, and which celebrates those “acting in a spirit of bravado.”.
References
1. The Argus. Melbourne: January 27, 1873: 5; January 29, 1873: 5. I am grateful to Penny Russell for allowing me to make use of this material from her research on the history of manners in nineteenth-century Australia.
2. Interview conducted by Alecia Simmonds with Sarah Harrison and Anika Vinson. Sydney: 15 June 2007.
3. Ibid.
4. Australian Broadcasting Corporation News Online. “Chaser stunt raises questions about APEC security.” <www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/09/07/2026566.html>.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Crooke, Robert. The Convict. Hobart: University of Tasmania Library, 1958. 21.
8. Douglas, Roger. Dealing With Demonstrations: The Law of Public Protest and Its Enforcement. Sydney: Federation Press, 2004. 15.
9. Levy v Victoria (1997) HCA 31 at 70 per Brennan J.
10. Interview with Sarah Harrison and Anika Vinson. Sydney: 15 June 2007.
11. ABC News Online. Chaser stunt. <www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/09/07/2026566.html>.
12. Marr, David. Quarterly Essay 26: His Master’s Voice – the corruption of public debate under Howard. Sydney: Black Ink Press, 2007. 16.
13. Vinson and Harrison v R (2007) Downing Local Court.
14. Ibid.
15. Crimes Act 1900 NSW: Section 546D.