Many cite our action as a possible new trajectory. But it is not new. In fact, over the decades that policies of mandatory detention and remote or offshore processing have endured, there have been multiple incidents of creative, high-risk media stunts. Probably the closest precedent to our action was 2004's Big Brother contestant, Merlin Luck, staging a silent protest during the live eviction show, holding a small banner which read ‘FREE TH REFUGEES’.

There is a long history of urban communities and neighbourhoods fighting vested interests over competing visions of what the city might look like and how it provides access to housing, transport and other amenities. Cities are one of those important sites for contrasting ideas about how a society should be structured and organised. In the 1970s and again in the 1990s, the area around Alexandra Parade has been the location of struggle over the building and extension of the Eastern Freeway into inner northern suburbs.