The fight to end the US military occupation of Australia (and the entire world)

For 64 years – an insignificant speck of time under a sky this large – from a stolen, sacred site of the Arrernte people called Kuyunba, the American military base Pine Gap gathers data that is used to subjugate millions of innocent, ordinary people across this world.

Kuyunba still holds ancient rock art and even older knowledge. Its people want to return.

Although Australians are sold a flimsy narrative about this “joint” base and its “defensive” capabilities, in the real world, in actual reality and not just fascistic propaganda narratives, since 1962, Pine Gap has played a crucial role in the murders of millions of predominantly black and brown people from Vietnam to Cambodia, Iraq to Afghanistan, Lebanon to Palestine.

For Felicity Hayes, an Arrernte elder and traditional owner of Kuyunba, this does not sit at all well.

“What they’re doing to the little fellas in Gaza, from our land, it’s not right. We feel responsible. We never gave permission. My grandfather couldn’t even speak English when they built the base. We weren’t asked.”

Felicity and her family live in a community called Irrkerlantye, or White Gate, a stunning but ill-advised 5km stroll away from the giant American golfballs of death. 

Even in the trillionaire age, contrasting circumstances are rarely more extreme than this. The CIA base is one of the most technologically advanced facilities on this planet. In the event of a nuclear war, the orders that kill the world will pass through it. Irrkerlantye does not have electricity. 

Successive governments of apparently all descriptions, from neoliberal red to neoliberal blue, have ignored calls from the Arrernte to be connected to the electricity grid. Which, it has to be stressed, is not very fucking far away. This is yet another indignity upon an endless desert of relatively recent indignities.

Answering a call from Felicity and her mob, and coordinated by anti-genocide activists in Naarm/Melbourne, the motliest possible assortment of Australians converged on Mparntwe-Alice Springs for a weekend of learning, connecting, with the land and each other, some collective healing, strategising, and a solid dose of resisting a violent and rotting supremacist empire. 

Campfires, stages and/or dish-washing duties were shared by First Nations peoples, students, unionists, activists, Marxists, anarchists, academics, journalists, lawyers, Palestinians and people from the wider Levant, anti-Zionist Jews, a former IDF-er on a lifelong mission of atonement, refugees, poets, painters, the young, the old, even an Arrernte heavy metal band (Southeast Desert Metal, check ‘em out) and a federal Senator. 

I didn’t encounter a single stockbroker or Thales employee amongst us. Despite this oversight, it was a pleasure to live among the realest diversity I have ever experienced in my life. The better version of this land. An idea still worth fighting for. The anti-monoculture. The only healthy way out. 

Mostly it’s just cooperating, connecting honestly, calmly, and trying to be better. When the trappings, responsibilities and distractions of 2026’s Australia meet the oldest possible world one can still meet today, the rock in the area more than a billion years old, sometimes diversity just looks like tangled chargers in the grass.

NSW Greens Senator David Shoebridge was invited to attend by the Hayes family. The activists’ plan was sound, but dangerous, and tricky to pull off… It would benefit from the added safety and “newsy-ness” provided by a federal parliamentarian.  

On the day before the blockade, I spoke with Shoebridge at length. As a general rule, I do not like politicians. They are paid far too much to lie to us, to pretend to be fighting with each other, professional wrestling style, all the while selling out my son’s future. Most of them are arrogant and stupid. Some are malevolent posing as naive. But this conversation was, in contrast to those broadcast through our dinosaur media on a mind-numbing anxiety loop, actually grounded in real reality and not gaslight-y bullshit.

“I’m there sometimes in federal parliament, right? And we’re talking about the climate and, you know, potential total natural collapse. And what that obviously means is massive security issues and economic issues. Natural collapse is like a disaster zone. And they keep doubling down on it!

“And I look at them and they want to keep joining in and doubling down on the US military alliance and nuclear submarines and US military. They want to protect and defend and resource the Israeli military in the occupation. It’s like they’re in some kind of death cult and I’m thinking, ‘Am I the only one who hasn’t been initiated into the death cult?’” – David Shoebridge, sounding like a normal person and not a psychopath

Ideas and energy were shared over the weekend. Remah Naji is a Palestinian academic based in Queensland. She is imminently launching a free speech case against the Crisafulli Government for its Orwellian, absurd and embarrassing outlawing of the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada”.   

She explains that the Zionist capitalist empire resembles an octopus in structure. “The octopus has been used across history to describe empires. It was used for the British, Russian, and American empires.” She describes a central head, a control room, with tentacles stretching out from there, all across the globe.   

“Knowing that a lot of the crimes we hear of and see on our screens are a result of the spy base we have here at Alice Springs… We are in the presence of evil.” 

Whether that octopus head is in Washington, Tel Aviv or Epstein island, you can decide, but in Pine Gap its tentacles stretch across Arrernte land. 

At a briefing in a repurposed circus tent the evening before the protest, the plan of action is shared with the larger group. The mood shifts. No one is fucking about at the strangest mix of a fairly standard OH&S meeting and the Rebel Alliance explaining how to blow up a Death Star; contingencies A, B and C outlined, legal and safety risks discussed consciously, seriously. 

The action has two main aims: disrupt the death machine by blocking the only road in and out of Pine Gap, and support the Hayes family as they deliver a letter, alongside Senator Shoebridge, outlining their demands for the US and Australian governments. 

Those demands are fourfold: the closure of the base, the return of Kuyunba, reparations to the Arrernte, and to the families in Gaza tormented by Pine Gap.

The car convoy, led by Hayes, would travel past the warning signs along Hatt Rd, past the legal risks, the police barricades, the drone surveillance, the threat of seven years jail for carrying a camera “in the neighbourhood of Pine Gap” and the internal anxieties telling everyone to turn around.

During the mission briefing, a dozen cars parked along the road had their tyres slashed. The night prior, fireworks were shot into the camp, starting a minor blaze around 1am. Either local far-right agitators desperately needed to lick a boot in the middle of the night, or the Mossad is losing its touch.

6AM wake up call in a freezing tent or not, you do not sleep particularly well the night before dropping in on Australia’s most likely to be nuked location, the local CIA base. 

As 600 odd souls got ready to stare down dystopia, much else was happening around the world. Breakfast before sunup was accompanied by the World Cup final projected onto an upturned trestle table. Being anti-fascists, everyone wanted Spain to win. US military bases like Pine Gap but in Jordan were being attacked, legitimate targets in the American-Israeli war of aggression on Iran. And Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was in Darwin, officially opening Exercise Pitch Black, described as Australia’s “premier international air combat exercise,” shaking hands with the warmachine.

We rolled out with the match heading into extra time. At the turn off to Hatt Rd on the Sturt Highway, NT police had set up a “random” breathalyser checkpoint. 

Unperturbed, the convoy proceeded, past the first warning sign, itself of no legal powers just intimidatory ones. And then past the second sign, an entirely different story altogether in terms of risks. 

The road was now blocked, the police cordon approached.

After calm, forceful negations at the checkpoint, a much smaller contingent crossed over into more dangerous, more uncharted territory. 

Three generations of Hayes women led the way, accompanied by Shoebridge, a legal observer, some organisers, a few photographers and myself. A military drone buzzed like malaria, tracking our approach. This was as close to their sacred site the Arrernte have stood since Pine Gap first blighted their land.  

As Felicity Hayes read her letter to a representative of the base, this remarkable woman living without electricity extended her solidarity to oppressed people on the other side of the world. In that moment, I wanted every politician pretending up is down, left is right, and that genocide is defence, and every hack in the press that has covered for them, to feel pain, shame, and the scorn of the liberated world.

“We’ll hang this letter in the museum once we’ve closed the base,” says Shoebridge. After a moment of reflection, the Hayes family turn away, and return to the larger protest group and a hero’s welcome.

When raging against a machine this powerful, this deceptive, this global, it is impossible to understand all the ripple effects of our actions. 

Perhaps the stones we throw sink, swallowed by a sea of indifference. Perhaps they swell into tomorrow’s tsunamis.

The important part is that we keep throwing them. 

The Convergence’s ongoing goal is to close Pine Gap. Sources in town revealed to Nathalie Farah, a fourth generation refugee and one of the principal organisers, that we were more successful in that regard than intended. Staff at the base, who notoriously describe themselves as “gardeners” when quizzed by locals in the pubs, were told to stay home for the four days of the gathering. 

Recent Pew polling shows that 87-percent of young Australians despise US-Israeli atrocities and Australia’s complicity. The traditional owners of the land feel the same way. As inequality, supremacist violence and authoritarian repression surge, their story and your story become further intertwined.

History shows us that all empires fall, and this one is rotting from the inside out. This week 600 brave souls did everything they could to help it along its way.

Maybe a child in Gaza is alive today because the evil of this facility was disrupted for four days. Maybe not. 

But you do have to try.