The rally in Melbourne hasn’t gotten much coverage because of Sydney, but it is mentioned here. They claim 3000 attended but that’s way off, it was easily 25-40,000 (some estimates I’ve seen go as high as 50k). The march stretched down most of Bourke St and I couldn’t see the start or end of it.
300k was the organiser estimate for Sydney which is about 5-6% of the city.
On Sydney, and regarding the estimates. We had to wait an hour since the marching started before where we stood even started moving. I too couldn’t see the start or the end. I don’t now how to measure the size of such a crowd, but 90k has to be an underestimation. The SCG has a capacity of 48k people, and I am familiar with tip-toeing out of that filled stadium. I’ve been to rallies (albeit 20 years ago) where the numbers were in the tens of thousands. All of those crowds felt trivial in comparison to the one at this march. 300k does seem to be a lot closer to the truth.
Hard to find footage of the Melbourne rally. I saw a clip somewhere that showed it to be much larger than I’ve seen reported. Lots of media reporting seems to be downplaying these rallies, or focusing on anything other than the message of the rallies.
EDIT:
This was the clip I had seen: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DM4ibgKxTJR/
Or rehosted here: https://files.catbox.moe/6fqz5d.mp4Oh haha, cool I saw myself. Yeah I tried getting some photos when we went down Bourke St, but it was so massive that it actually looks small. The crowd disappeared over the hill heading west and went around the corner back up Swanston. In the photos the crowd just blurs and looks like part of the road or something, so you can’t get a good idea of the scale. I was really hoping for aerial footage, though tbf I haven’t gone looking.
Some aerial footage here: https://www.9news.com.au/national/propalestine-protesters-barred-from-melbourne-bridge/02f1a339-a25d-4c57-9d0e-32171e1ee0e9
It only seems to show small parts of the protest at any one time. You can see in ground-level shots that the crowd is much bigger than it ever appears in the helicopter shots.
That’s shockingly good reporting from 9. Acknowledging the excessive show of force from the police, and the difference between them being militarised and the anti-genocide protestors being old men and women with scarves. And not even as an afterthought, but as a really good chunk of the story.
