The Umbrella People

Cafe Locked Out

Apr 15, 2022

On the Australian Western rim of the great reset, where the compliant, who are the majority, peer at us over their masks, like baffled and beaten prisoners, leading themselves, without prompting, to somewhere it appears they don’t want to go, we heard about, and then sought out, The Umbrella People.
Most of them were mature. Late thirties plus through to people late in their seventies, they came from both sides, and collated outside the entrance to Western Australia’s Governor’s House.
They carried no banners, no mega phones, and they all unpacked smiles as they approached each other, and there were hand shakes and shoulder pats and hugs. And most of them were carrying umbrellas.
The side walk was narrow, and they lined both sides, leaving a corridor in the middle for the masked tribe to pass through.
Their Leader, Leigh was a tall man. An ex fire fighter, and despite his years, he had the abundant confidence in his swagger, as he carried the big PA speaker towards the gate, to explain why so many people were here and following him. You could see the fires burning and him evaluating the flames before leading his team, with that larrikin grin clearly built on empathy, into the burning front line, determined to save the lives and property of the people who never imagined that this much reality would come hunting for them.
And this diverse platoon, volunteers from suburbs, many cast out by the masked tribe, including their families and friends, exiled from their jobs and dreams, flocked to him for his courage was so infectious he left them all smiling.
For one hundred and thirty two days, come rain and hail and despite this often brutal Western Australian sun, he’s come here to defend the freedoms won by his ancestors. An abundant liberty the masked had already handed over, so that they could try and retain their mounds of dirt that they hadn’t yet realised would never be worth the price of theirs and their children’s souls.
Even if we won, there would be no statues built to honour this man, except perhaps in the stories old people would somewhere in the future tell people who wouldn’t listen, about the defiance of the Umbrella People.
It was Leigh who came up with the idea of the Umbrellas. The plan was to one, shield them from the sun which in the summer would beat those willing to stand under it here, as though this pavement was an anvil. And two, to make this group look larger than it was.
Every day they’ve met at 8am and stayed until 10, but Leigh told me once they had, through their persistence, drawn thousands here, then they would never leave. Then we’ll stay he told me, until the Governor relented and dissolved this oppressive government, and allowed Western Australians everywhere to vote in new leaders.
Inside the Governor’s mansion, protected by its walls and iron gates, its cameras and lush gardens, Kim Beazley, another big man, a Rhode Scholar, who had clearly benefited from his life in politics, despite knowing he had never achieved what he took for granted his intelligence and stature would naturally achieve, ignored them.
And soon he would be gone, replaced by the ex-police commissioner, who had rolled out these vaccine mandates that had destroyed the culture he was born into. A man who would take possession of this mansion at the behest of the Premier who was the architect of all this change.
For a State blessed with so much sun, and crowned with an often immense blue sky, it felt strange to feel like we were all standing below thick grey clouds that were still gathering above the umbrellas of this little outpost.
And so we set out to capture their stories. Recording the experiences and thoughts of any of these soldiers who were willing to use their voices as weapons of recruitment from anyone out there who no longer wants to be led to a future they don’t want to reach.
One man, originally from Holland, told me how his Grandfather had been a part of the resistance group who had burned archives in order to make it harder for the Nazis to locate the Jews. A man who had spent the rest of the war in hiding as the Nazis imprisoned his wife and brother in order to try flush him out. He was here now, the aging grandson, because defiance was in his DNA and because too, in this State he was, because he wouldn’t conform, the equivalent of a Jew.
One man had framed a stained glass tribute, to celebrate them all and Leigh. In the top of the frame was a digger’s slouch hat, and below it a sea of crowded and brightly coloured Umbrellas.
And as I write this now, I’m wondering if this presence I can feel in my soul is God, and if there is a place that we used to know as heaven, and if, on its cloudy walls, the angels have hung copies of this framed gift, so that their endless sun, this force for good, is passing through its colours and decorating their white wings with the spectrum of this platoon’s courage.