Photos from the Flotillas of Hope Journey to Nauru

Recently I tweeted a whole pile of photos from my Flotillas of Hope archive. The thought crossed my mind that it will be good to put a whole lot of them on one page. I won’t give captions of each. Assume when you see photos of boats they are either of Eureka or One Off. There many aspects of the journey to Nauru not only the boat trip.

The excerpt below is from The Tragic Miracle of Consciousness: John Steinbeck on the True Meaning and Purpose of Hope post on Marginalia

When you see photos of stuff on boats they are on one of the boats. The flags were ALL made by community members as were all the pieces of material with messages from Australians. There are also pictures of toys which were gifts from Aussies for the kids at Nauru. We didn’t get to give them the gifts because we were chased out by Nauru Government. The more hazy pics of beaches or buildings in the distance are the photos I took of Nauru when we approached the island. I sent these via satellite phone to our Australian ground crew who then uploaded them on the website. In 2004 social media wasn’t around and yet we got the message out & brought some hope to the asylum seekers. John Howard, Prime Minister at the time released 77 refugees because of our journey.

We were told after we returned to Australia by the refugees released by Howard due to our journey that there were Australian police waiting for us with guns on beaches of Nauru.

There’s also a photo of the Tarot Spread that Starhawk made for the Flotillas of Hope when we met.

When you see photos of islanders they are all from Solomon Islands. When you see buildings and landscapes they are again on Solomon Islands.