Hundreds take the Wollongong Sea Cliff Bridge for Palestine

2025 will go down as the year of the bridge marches. The historic 300,000-strong March for Humanity across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The march across the Commonwealth Bridge in Canberra. On 7 December, it was the Illawarra’s turn, with a procession of several hundred across the scenic Sea Cliff Bridge in Coalcliff.

Chances are you’ve seen this bridge before. It has featured in dozens of car ads and the film clip for Guy Sebastian’s song “Choir”. In 2011, it was the location for an impressive thousand-strong mobilisation to stop coal seam gas exploration in the region.

The organising group, Wollongong Friends of Palestine, organises regular rallies in Crown Street Mall and community pickets against Bisalloy Steels, which manufactures armour for Israeli military vehicles. After a series of successful pickets and a great demonstration at the beach in October, we decided it was time to do something bold and take the bridge for Palestine.

Just days before the demonstration, Israel launched a drone strike on a refugee camp at al-Mawasi, burning five Palestinian refugees alive in their tents. The Labor government has accepted the so-called ceasefire as a gift to wipe its hands clean of any complicity in the genocide. US President Donald Trump is orchestrating a process that will allow international armies to occupy Gaza.

The message at the demonstration was clear: we need to keep the pressure on. Our movement will continue to call for sanctions on Israel and an end to the arms trade. The march across the bridge was one of the largest demonstrations for Palestine in the Illawarra for several years. It brought people from all walks of life: Palestinian uncles and aunts, parents, preschoolers, skaters, nurses, leftists, socialists and community activists. Some keen beans even had the foresight to make it to the top of the escarpment and wave the flag down at us as we crossed the bridge.

There are several lessons to draw from this experience. One is about existing attitudes to the situation in Gaza. As the genocide enters a new phase, our side will likely lose some momentum. The ceasefire, by design, has taken the heat off Israel. Unlike in August, the media no longer has wall-to-wall coverage of starving Palestinians. It can be easy for people to feel despair at the situation. But many people refuse to let Gaza slip out of their consciousness. These are the people who can keep the movement alive and build greater numbers when the next controversy or atrocity occurs.

Another is the importance of demonstrations to any campaign. The late Marxist art critic John Berger wrote, in “The nature of mass demonstrations”: “Demonstrations are essentially urban in character, and they are usually planned to take place as near as possible to some symbolic centre, either civic or national. Their ‘targets’ are seldom the strategic ones”. As far as we know, the Sea Cliff Bridge has no connection to the state of Israel. Nor did blocking it cause any significant disruption to profit-making and capitalism. But as the slaughter rages on, the cause of the Palestinians should be highlighted everywhere, all the time. Taking this landmark meant we could put the issue front and centre in our region.

A third is the importance of being prepared to tackle a controversy head-on. Blocking a piece of infrastructure is a divisive thing to do at the best of times. For some residents of the northern Illawarra, who are very rarely inconvenienced, a two-hour traffic delay seems the worst human suffering they can imagine. In any case, this obviously cannot compare to the constant, inescapable suffering of Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza.

We maintained that we have as much right to our bridge as any popstar, car company or bike race. What helped was reaching out to gain support: the South Coast Labour Council endorsed the event, we gained support from sitting pro-Palestine councillors, and it was promoted by the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association and the NSW Greens.

A lot of legwork went into spreading the word about the rally far and wide. Local communities were letterboxed, posters were pasted across town, and we even found some friendly lefty baristas who were happy to display a poster in their workplace after a simple ask. We discovered groups we didn’t know existed, like 2508 Parents for Palestine, from the small northern community of Helensburgh.

It was clear this promotional work would be necessary even before we saw the numbers on the day: the police authorised our protest to march on the road only after weeks of public outreach. As the political right becomes more assertive, the left should be confident that we can stand up to their arguments and can carry working-class people with us.

Megan Guy is a member of Wollongong Friends of Palestine.