In 2003, award-winning photojournalist Dean Sewell, then in his early 30s, started documenting the activities of a group called the Lonely Station. Part of a new wave of culture jammers dedicated to disrupting and subverting cultural institutions, this collective of law and fine arts students were expressing their anger about issues such as Tasmania’s deforestation, the Iraq war and Australian detention centres through modified billboard advertisements, graffiti and ‘public art’ – much as the BUGA UP (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions) movement had targeted cigarette advertising in the ‘80s.
After a decade of documenting protest at home and abroad (including the Chechen war), Sewell found himself drawn to the culture jamming movement. “For me it signalled a marked shift in how people were conducting protest; it was going beyond that dogmatic street marching, banner-waving, hollering sort of thing, and it was taking protest to a different level.”
Sewell’s documentation of the Lonely Station’s exploits is the focus of the
Museum of Sydney’s exhibition, Culture Jamming, which presents a sort of ‘potted history’ of the group, taking up with their No War campaign in March 2003 (a show of support for the infamous defacement of the Sydney Opera House sails which involved replicating the same ‘No War’ slogan on every public representation of Sydney Opera House TLS could find), and closing with their Dirty Laundry sculpture-jam in late 2006 (involving a strategically placed Hills Hoist bearing an orange prison jumpsuit emblazoned with the word ‘Hicks’). In between is a string of actions through which we see Sewell’s role expand from documenter to active participant, and the Lonely Station evolve to incorporate – even rely on – the media.
The beginning of Sewell’s four-year adventure was a conversation with Neal Funnell, a founding member of TLS who was barely 20 when he swapped rallies for culture jamming, after he was the victim of a brutal police assault during the May Day protest in 2001. Funnell recalls having seen Dean at numerous Sydney protests during his activist years – “this big, feral, Abominable Snowman-looking character; I would never have guessed he was a photojournalist.”
The pinnacle of their collaboration was the Spirit of Tasmania stunt of January 2004, where Lonely Station members aboard the maiden voyage of the Hobart-Sydney ferry abseiled off the lower deck to unfurl a banner that transformed the boat’s name to ‘Woodchipping the Spirit of Tasmania’. The stunt would have had little-to-no impact without documentation and dissemination by the media – and primarily Sewell, who was poised in exactly the right time and place to best capture the stunt, and whose photo graced the front cover of the Sydney Morning Herald (for whom he worked) the next morning.
“It’s about reclaiming the mental space of our citizens,” Sewell says. “People are brainwashed by the spin of governments and advertising firms, and it’s about providing a circuit break, I guess, of that spin; giving people a moment of pause, allowing them to really evaluate the issues – and allowing them to reinterpret those issues.”
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