ISBN: 9780980415117

The book can be ordered through James Bennett library supplier.

How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Hoaxes, Graffiti and Political Mischief-Making from across Australia. Written by Iain McIntyre. Published by Breakdown Press, 2009.

Bulk order discounts: 5 books = $135 ($27 per book) | 10 books = $250 ($25 per book)

www.BreakdownPress.org

If you are a bookstore, school, library, local distro or community organisation and would like to buy bulk copies of the book to sell yourselves or to your members please email: distro@breakdownpress.org

Also available in good bookstores nationally for the Recommended Retail Price of $29.95 (Aus) .

Available at these good bookshops

If you would like to sell copies of the book through your bookstore, community organisation or distro email us at distro@breakdownpress.org

VICTORIA:
STICKY, Degraves St Subway under Flinders St, Melbourne
THE BRUNSWICK STREET BOOKSTORE, 305 Brunswick St, Fitzroy
BRUNSWICK BOUND, 361 Sydney Rd, Brunswick
AVENUE BOOKSTORE, 127 Dundas Place, Albert Park
DYMOCKS CAMBERWELL, Shop 113-114 The Well at Camberwell, 793 Burke Road, Camberwell,
LOCAL and GLOBAL, 1669 Burwood Highway, Belgrave
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY BOOKSHOP, Baillieu Library Building, Melbourne University, Parkville Campus
THE PAPERBACK BOOKSHOP, 60 Bourke St, Melbourne
POLYESTER BOOKS, 330 Brunswick St, Fitzroy
READINGS, 309 Lygon St Carlton, 701 Glenferrie Rd Hawthorn and 112 Acland St, St Kilda
WOLF AT THE DOOR, 113 Main Street, Hepburn Springs
FRIENDS OF THE EARTH BOOKSHOP, 312 Smith St, Collingwood
THE GREVILLE ST BOOKSTORE, 145 Greville St, Prahran
ARTISAN BOOKS, 159 Gertrude St, Fitzroy
NEW INTERNATIONAL BOOKSHOP, Trades Hall, 54 Victoria Street, Carlton South
COLLECTORS CORNER, 240 Swanston Walk, Melbourne
SUN BOOKSHOP, 10 Ballarat St, Yarraville
ENRIQUE ECOSTORE, 168a Liebig St Warrnambool
MISSING LINK, Basement 405 Bourke Street, Melbourne
SHOP SUI, 227 Gertrude St, Fitzroy

NEW SOUTH WALES:
GLEEBOOKS, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe
BERKELOUW, 6-8 O’Connell St, Newtown
FEMINIST BOOKSHOP, Shop 9, Orange Grove Plaza, Balmain Rd, Lilyfield
MCA STORE, Circular Quay Foyer, Level 1, Museum of Contemporary Art, West Circular Quay, The Rocks
JURA, 440 Parramatta Rd, Petersham North
BRAYS BOOKS BALMAIN, 268 Darling Street, Balmain
BETTER READ THAN DEAD, 265 King Street, Newtown
THE HILL OF CONTENT, 275 Darling St, Balmain

NORTHERN TERRITORY:
ALEC (Arid Lands Environment Centre), 17 John Cumming Plaza, Todd Mall, Alice Springs
Anarchist Info Stall at Nightcliff Sunday Market in Darwin,  8AM-2PM each Sunday

QUEENSLAND:
AVID READER, 193 Boundary Street, West End, Brisbane

ACT:
PAPERCHAIN BOOKSTORE, 34 Franklin Street, Manuka
NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA BOOKSHOP, Parkes Place, Parkes
SMITH’S ALTERNATIVE BOOKSHOP, 76 Alinga St, Canberra City

SOUTH AUSTRALIA:
DARK HORSEY, The Lion Arts Centre, North Terrace (West End) Adelaide
IMPRINTS BOOKSELLERS, 107 Hindley St, Adelaide
NEW INTERNATIONALIST, 28 Austin Street, Adelaide (www.newint.com.au/shop)
DYNAMIC DUO COMICS, Shop 15, City Centre Arcade, Rundle Mall, Adelaide

TASMANIA
FULLERS BOOKSHOP, 131 Collins St, Hobart, TAS, 7000

Book launch THURSDAY the 3rd December 2009 -  upstairs at the Berkelouw Cafe and Bookshop Newtown, 6-8 O’Connell St, Newtown, 6pm-8pm. Entry is free and speakers include the book’s author Iain McIntyre as well as Dr Meredith Burgmann, Mother Inferior (Order of Perpetual Indulgence) and Simon Hunt (Pauline Pantsdown).

Launch party SATURDAY the 5th December 2009 – at the Red Rattler, 6 Faversham St Marrickville, 8pm-midnight. Entry is $10 and speakers will include Iain McIntyre, Rachel Evans (No To Pope Coalition) and Dave Burgess (who painted No War on the Opera House in 2003) plus projections, DJs and live music from Lee Memorial (Melbourne, ex Sodastream), Bare Arms and NinetyNine (Melbourne). The first 50 payers get a free Rock Against Bullshit XMas CD featuring Yuletide odes from the bands and more.

Thanks to everyone who attended the  launching of the book at This Is Not Art Festival in Newcastle! It felt right to be putting the book out into the world first in Newcastle amongst so many good people. Special thanks to Dave Burgess for speaking at the launch, it was an honour to have our favourite graffiti artist and good friend there with us to launch the book.

Also thanks to everyone who came to the MELBOURNE LAUNCH! It was a great night!
Special thanks to Louise Morris, The John Howard Ladies’ Auxiliary Fan Club and the Bella Union Bar at Trades Hall.

We look forward to catching up with everyone at the upcoming launches.

Click Here to Order through Breakdown Press online.

Welcome to the collected and expanded edition of How To Make Trouble and Influence People. For over a decade this series of books and pamphlets has focused on how generations of Australian troublemakers have moved beyond political inertia to push the boundaries of “acceptable” protest. As a result, the publications have not only included tales of pranks and hoaxes designed to humiliate the rich and powerful and illuminate the rest of us, but also creative and comedic graffiti, posters, placards and other protest ephemera. Similarly tactics and strategies, like strikes, that may have been relatively common for one group of Australians at a particular time and place have been shown to be creatively subversive when used in a different context, say by high-school students or in solidarity with those struggling against Apartheid in South Africa.

The first volume of this series came out in 1996 as an 80-page, self-published zine documenting and celebrating Australian political pranking and creative direct action. How To Make Trouble and Influence People proved to be a modest success and in 1998 ABC radio produced a documentary and website using the title. The zine was reprinted a number of times by anarchist collective Scam Publications before spawning two sequels, How To Stop Whining And Start Living in 1999 and Revenge Of The Troublemaker in 2003. A collection of more in-depth essays, Disturbing The Peace: Tales From Australia’s Rebel History, was also published in 2005 as an adjunct to the original series.

With material for a fourth volume piling up Tom Sevil and Lou Smith from Breakdown Press came on board, agreeing to assist not only with design, publication and editing, but also with sourcing new material, mainly photographs and images, via their own networks. Since all of the earlier publications were long out of print we decided to bring together the best material from the first three books along with hundreds of new listings and graphics. The material on Aotearoa/New Zealand which appeared in the first publication, has been put aside for a separate volume, also the chapters from Disturbing The Peace have not been included here, but the book is available in PDF form via www.howtomaketroubleandinfluencepeople.org.

Covering a wide gamut of seditious political acts, from Indigenous guerrilla resistance to anti-uranium blockades and Critical Mass bike rides, this collected and expanded edition provides a potted, although far from detailed, history of Australian radical politics from the colonial era onwards. It is informed by a commonly held belief on the Left that social progress does not emanate from the pronouncements of “enlightened” politicians, but instead derives from grassroots resistance to inequality and discrimination. Today’s troublemakers may understandably feel isolated and overwhelmed, but they are not the first to find themselves in such a position. History is filled with individuals and organisations who were totally out of step with the mainstream of their time, but whose ideas around racism, gender, sexuality and workers’ rights eventually found some level of acceptance, if not success.

In learning about the deeds of rebels past, we are provided with a memory bank of ideas and tactics from which to draw. These tales and images also serve to remind us that political activity need not be a predictable and grim slog. As well-resourced as our opponents may be, they are vulnerable to the use of creativity, solidarity and humour. Indeed, these are often the only tools we have.

Another major factor originally pushing me towards researching and writing about Australian radical history was a cultural cringe that I encountered when I first got involved in a variety of activist scenes during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many of us seemed to know more about the revolutionary history of Spain or Russia than we knew about Australia, and our strategies and ideas, and even our fashion sense, were often based on movements that were happening tens of thousands of kilometres from where we were. Now there is nothing wrong with showing solidarity and taking a broad view, but I believe that it is vital that we understand our own history and traditions if we are to make a difference in the country where we live. I’m hardly the first person to assert this and there are plenty of great books about Australia’s radical history, but the fact that many important struggles remain largely forgotten continues to spur me on.

To more widely disseminate knowledge that would otherwise have remained buried within the realms of academia, and in the memories of those who lived it, the summaries and quotes in the original books, and this new one, have deliberately been presented in what I hope is an accessible, yet thought-provoking format. The listings have also been presented non-chronologically in order to illustrate the diversity of Australian political action over two centuries, as well as reveal otherwise hidden continuities.

Much of the material contained in this collection and its predecessors has been gleaned from interviews and stories passed on by friends and acquaintances, as well as from publications found in radical collections such as those located at the Collective of Self Help Groups, Jura Books, Barricade Infoshop, Melbourne Resistance Centre, Perth Anarchist Library and Loophole Community Centre. Many hours have also been spent in more formal state, university and local libraries poring over activist publications and the work of labour historians. Websites such as the Indymedia family and EngageMedia.org, and the occasional anonymous submission by email, have further assisted the research process.

Although a myriad of Australian researchers and writers have helped inform and inspire this series (many of whom can be found in the bibliography) two overseas influences deserve special mention — the late UK situationist Larry Law and his Buffo booklet and the original San Franciscan ReSearch group with their Pranks tome. Like the former, I have compiled a number of accounts covering a wide range of incendiary activities. As with the latter, this edition includes for the first time, a series of dialogues with well-known, and not-so-well known, creative activists. These interviews cover the history and modus operandi of a variety of campaigns, groups and individuals in greater depth than a simple summary would otherwise allow. They also include dialogues with popular entertainers Chris Taylor (from The Chaser) and John Safran, both of whom, while not activists themselves, have demonstrated how a critical and mischievous approach to issues and public figures can be thought-provoking and subversive.

In the end, of course, the main inspiration for a book like this remains the people documented within it, those who continue to work (and play) towards a more sustainable, ethical and fulfilling society. As the old saying goes “Keep on swimming against the stream, only dead fish go with the flow.”

– Iain McIntyre, 2009.

We’d love to here people’s reflections on the original zines!

Feel free to leave a comment below.

Featuring Stories and images collected together from Australia’s radical past. A rich collection of often unheard events and people from across the land.

Written and Researched by Iain McIntyre with the assistance in Book Design, Photo Research and Editing by Lou Smith and Tom Sevil.
Published by Breakdown Press, 2009.

How did you first get involved with Sydney BUGA-UP?

The first billboard I saw that BUGA-UP had done was one featuring five newsreaders where someone had written across the bottom, “Five blind mice”. That got me interested in the whole process. Shortly after, I passed by a local hall that had a meeting board up about a presentation by BUGA-UP and I went in. I got interested and decided to, not exactly join the group because you couldn’t join the group, but get involved. You just turned up and helped with the billboards.
Soon after the meeting I went out with three other members. We generally just sat around in the car, parked near some billboards and discussed what we were going to do. Some people who’d done it before had pretty good ideas. You could get your own line across if you wanted to. Once that was decided, we’d get out and there would be one or two lookouts and maybe up to three working on various bits of the billboard, because they were pretty big. The easiest ones were on the railway stations as they have quite big billboards on a lot of the train stations in Sydney. One night I think we must have done 20, all along the railway line, from station to station, just following on. That was all pretty trouble-free because there was no surveillance in those days, no CCTV or anything like that.

In the time that you were involved, did you have an idea of how many other people there were revising billboards?

I was aware of a core of about 12 or so people, but there were probably up to about 20. We didn’t know the full extent of our numbers because people would often just do it by themselves. Generally we only met people on the run. We had a couple of workshops where we made extension rods and things like that, but that still only involved five or six people. There were about four or five people who were the original instigators or the beginners of the organisation and it expanded from there.
No-one knew everyone involved and there were lots of individuals and teams doing their own thing. The principle was that if you did a billboard on your own you could sign it BUGA-UP and that meant you were part of BUGA-UP. It was a very loose, informal kind of arrangement, deliberately so because of legal reasons.

Which companies did BUGA-UP mainly target?

People went after various targets, but it was generally cigarettes or alcohol. I only did the cigarette- and alcohol-related ones. Some people were pretty obsessive about doing whatever billboard they could find.
A lot of the cigarette advertising was on government property as the railways had a lot of billboards. I think up to about 50% of the advertising on billboards for cigarettes was on government property. It seemed like a crazy idea that the government would be promoting, or helping to promote, addictive things.
BUGA-UP was very loose though, there was no great prospectus or aims or principles written down. It was really based on an objection to using public space for these products and an attempt to break up the images and values that the advertising was trying to project. They were using a lot of glamour images for cigarettes. Alcohol had already changed a bit and I think they’d even brought in some sort of regulation. They sometimes just had the bottles or the cans and a clever caption. It was a challenge to work out new words to parody those. With tobacco they were still using luxury yachts and beautiful blonde people.

While your main agenda was clearly to subvert and alter the messages that the billboards carried, were you also trying to waste the companies’ money?

Partly that. The aim was to force the stuff off the billboards. The chances were pretty small, however, of making it uneconomical for them, because the cigarette industry had been taken off TV. So they had plenty of money to play with.

How many billboards were changed on a regular basis?

Quite a few along the railways because even individuals would do up to a dozen a night, maybe once a week. When you put together all the different individuals and groups there were probably at least 50 getting changed a week.

How long would they stay up?

Varying times. The ones on the railways were the best because they took months to fix them. As a big bureaucracy they didn’t really care that much. They would often stay up for several weeks. On private land generally they would have someone up there the next day, or within a couple of days.

What time of the day would you normally go and do the actions?

Normally late afternoon up until midnight. Generally the consensus was that after 10pm it was a bit harder because the police were more alert. More police were about and you were more conspicuous. The first time I got caught it was after 12 o’clock.

Would you dress up to make it appear that you worked for the billboard companies or did you just go out and do it?

I think some did get into character, but I didn’t do that. I basically turned up with a bag of spray cans and just started doing it. You kept looking about to make sure that there was no-one making themselves too obvious. When there was a group, probably four or five of us would go out in a car, and someone would keep a lookout. Generally people didn’t use disguise, as far as I know. There were some daytime actions where they made it quite public for the media.

How long would it take to do a billboard, roughly?

Probably not more than five minutes. Possibly only three minutes. It was all pretty quick. If you had more than one person doing it, then one would write the BUGA-UP thing, someone else would do a couple of words here and a couple of words up the top. Speed was of the essence, really.

What was the connection of BUGA-UP to MOP-UP (Movement Opposed to Unhealthy Promotions)?

There were, I think, one or two people in BUGA-UP who were also in MOP-UP. MOP-UP was mainly involved in the legal and medical side of fighting this kind of advertising in the courts. They used more conventional methods in fighting the companies.

But BUGA-UP captured the public’s imagination …

Yes, BUGA-UP was more public. Obviously it was pretty hard to get publicity for the opponents of tobacco and alcohol advertising when the companies involved had big budgets and the ear of the media. However, once our messages were up on the billboards all the commuters saw them and people liked them. Anything to break up that monotony of commuting, I guess.
There was quite a lot of positive feedback and generally not much resistance from people who saw us whilst we were actually changing them. There was one case where there was a newsagency which had a billboard above it that had been paint-bombed a few times. We were doing some billboards across the road on railway land when we saw the guy. He had seen us and we figured that he was calling the cops so we all scattered. We waited about half an hour and then came back just in time to see the police pull up. It wasn’t good timing.

How did the police react?

Although there were five of us and two of them it was all very peaceful. They took us back to the station and fingerprinted us. When it came to court, the original witness couldn’t actually determine who had done the spray on the billboard so the case was dismissed.
Many of the magistrates were pretty anti public disorder, but some of them liked the idea. The magistrate I got for that case was not a very happy guy. He said something like, “If you want to do something for society, why don’t you go and join the Lions Club or Rotary?” He just didn’t like the idea that what we were doing was illegal. The charge was “malicious injury to a billboard”, which was the heavier of the charges that they had available as it made it a criminal case.
Generally the police themselves would only act if they got a complaint from a member of the public. In another case concerning me there was a young trainee cop who was with his sergeant when they drove past and caught me at it. That was one I was doing on my own. He later apologised and told me that he had to say something because he would have been in trouble himself if the sergeant had seen me and he hadn’t said anything.
When I went to court I was charged with wilful defacement, which was a civil offence. I didn’t get a fine because it was a first offence. I didn’t contest the fact that I’d done it, but I did contest the compensation costs with the company. I had seen an ad in the paper looking to hire someone to fix billboards at one point and I rang up to find out how much they were going to pay them so I could use that in my defence. I was able to get the costs down to half what they wanted because I knew how much they were paying their staff. That was a pretty good result.
One of the guys involved in BUGA-UP was a photographer who was also involved in silk-screen printing. You could let him know where the billboards you’d done were and he’d photograph them for you. It was really handy when you went to Court because you’d have a record in case they tried to say that you had done more damage than you did. They might try to say that you had done some paint bombing, as well as the lettering and that wouldn’t have been as clear a message, I think, because the paint bombing could be seen as just vandalism.
As time went on they began to use the heavier charges against people. I think they felt a bit threatened by the whole movement. I had heard that Melbourne had introduced fines of up to $2,000 whereas Sydney was still around $150–$200 at that time.

Were people getting arrested a lot?

You heard of the occasional arrest. One guy was a continual offender and he used to do at least one billboard a day. He’d carry a bucket and some spray cans wherever he went. He was a regular arrestee, but generally there was not more than one arrest a month. There was a fighting fund which would pay half your fines as long as you signed BUGA-UP on the billboard.

How did the advertising industry react?

I think they mainly tried to play it down. Sometimes they would just paste white paper over the message and it would be clear that it had been altered. After a while they moved the captions to the top of the billboards so that it was harder to alter them. Generally, up until then, they had been at the bottom. So that made it a bit harder as we had to get our extension rods out.

Tell us about the use of the extension rods?

Well, they were a bit of a design challenge. You could buy an extension rod, I guess they were for professional painters, but they were quite expensive. I had this idea that we should find a cheap way to make one. We started off with a broom stick, some angle brackets and some wire and managed to create a prototype that just about anyone could put together with things you could buy from the local hardware shop.
You had to adjust the way you did things. You held the extension rod sideways to the billboard. The rod had a roll-on deodorant attached to it to keep the can a particular distance from the surface so that you could control the horizontal movement. That took away a lot of waving the stick about so you had a much more consistent spray angle on the billboard. It worked pretty well.

Did the advertising industry also move the advertisements to less accessible spots?

Where they could they did, but there were still lots on the ground. Some moved up a bit. They were still accessible, but higher than they used to be. Some of them were moved to the tops of buildings. I remember seeing a photo in the paper of some BUGA-UP people who did those sorts of jobs and used paint rollers. They probably only did that once or twice.

Did they have to scale the building?

No, they had access through the building. They were wearing white boilersuits as if they were workers. They only had to change a couple of words to change the meaning of the billboard completely. Paint bombing was a much better method for the high ones.

How would people do that?

The people I knew generally used paint-filled eggs. They were pretty good. You could get a pretty decent throw with those. Other people used balloons, but they weren’t as easy. I heard about one guy who had adapted the back of a panel van so that he could open the doors to use a catapult that was attached there. He could hit quite high billboards with this method. He was a very good aim and used quite large paint bombs.

How much of a role do you think that BUGA-UP played in getting tobacco advertising eventually banned and alcohol advertising restricted?

I think we mainly affected public awareness. Not just with tobacco and alcohol, but generally with making people more aware of how the advertising industry was attempting to manipulate them, the images that they were using, and the role of consumerism in all of that. I think BUGA-UP’s actions helped break down all that stuff.

For more information on BUGA-UP visit www.bugaup.org and
tobacco.health.usyd.edu.au websites.

“The APEC stunt was one of those days when you just get lucky. The odds of getting into the official APEC restricted zones were extremely slim, but we were all determined to give it a crack. The massive security measures had been a big news story, as well as a major inconvenience to Sydneysiders, so we thought it might be interesting to see how tight the security really was. We came up with a couple of ideas to try to gain access to the restricted areas: one was to “accidentally” drift into the restricted water zone on a pool pony; the other was to try to drive in by pretending to be one of the official motorcades attending the conference.”

CHRIS TAYLOR, from THE CHASER interview

We’ll put the full interview up soon.