To stage such an event is a crime against humanity and a crime against the planet itself. It is inexcusable on any level.
Boorloo experiences ongoing colonialism and its toxic legacies. Boorloo is being used as a staging post for future violence around the world. Unacceptable!
Peace is the only way.
Below is a poem written against this event (it refers to the original planting of memorial oak trees in 'Kings Park' — Kaarta Koomba — after the First World War) and here's a short, rough video I made last week when down in the city from within the 'Bishop's Garden' opposite the Convention Centre.
Reclaim
against the ‘Land Forces’ arms expo at the Perth Convention Centre 2026
Cameras will penetrate the faces
of those who lift their hands
to make peace signs, to object,
on this ‘reclaimed’ wetland,
the Perth Convention Centre
making its claim to the world’s
war-work. That it would break
humane conventions, would shatter
bodies across the globe,
fits with the agency
granted to weapons, those
euphemisms of culture and nature.
Under the reflections of mining towers,
fossil fuel empires, the cycle
of making and dissolution
will be in the purview
of arms dealers
and their companies.
Wreathed by traffic,
the arms expo sales junket
will animate glass,
concrete and steel.
The homeless have been
‘moved on’, and told
they’ll be ‘catered for’,
special powers legislated
to protect the oh so polite
death-zone artistes manqués
going peacefully about
their business, while heat-
stressed trees planted
for the war dead
on Kaarta Koomba
try to photosynthesise
bewilderment
as long dead oak trees once did
when a gunshot marked the first
memorial plantings
over a hundred years ago.
And now, expeditionary forces
promoting deft warcraft
highlight the sheen of weapons
before they explode,
before they deliver their verdict
on the life-industry of flesh and blood,
before they reclaim the world
for the inanimate, feigning
an organic sensibility.
John Kinsella
