Cory Bernardi Has Chucked A Huge Tantrum Over This Melbourne Band’s New Music Video
The band have received numerous death threats since the video was released.
Melbourne doom metal band Divide and Dissolve have had several music videos removed from Youtube after receiving a slew of abuse and negative media attention for ‘Resistance’, a new video in which the duo appear to spray urine on colonial monuments.
In the video, which premiered on Noisey last week, band members Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill use water pistols and mason jars to spray and splash ‘urine’ on monuments including Captain James Cook’s cottage in Fitzroy Gardens. Now the video has been taken down, and the duo have confirmed to Noisey the substance was coloured water.
The band expressed their intention with a message at the end of the video: to decolonise Australia and challenge the existence of colonial monuments, expressing that they represent centuries of pain for First Nations people.
“We would like to acknowledge that these are a few of the many monuments to genocide, white supremacy, colonial violence, cultural genocide, ecocide, slavery, rape and murder,” the message reads. “We are so excited to live in a world where these monuments do not exist. Bring them down. Decolonise now.”
Less than a day after the video premiered, Daily Mail labelled the clip “disgraceful” and “shameful”.
As Noisey reports, the video then gained widespread coverage. Echoing the Daily Mail, the video was called ‘outrageous’ and ‘bizarre’ across sites such as 9 News and retiree-orientated news site Startsat60, before becoming a topic on conservative commentator Neil Mitchell’s daily 3AW talk show.
During the segment, Mitchell interviewed the City of Melbourne’s Lord Mayor-elect Sally Capp, who said she was “aghast at the disrespect” she found in the video.
South Australian senator and leader of the Australian Conservatives Cory Bernardi also weighed in on Monday. He shared a statement to his official Facebook page from the party in which he calls the video an example of “groups who want to dismantle Australian society and its values — and it’s those values and traditions we need to protect and fend”.
Bernardi’s post is flooded with racist and abusive messages directed towards the band, who have confirmed they have received multiple death threats in the past week.
When contacted, the band shared a statement with Junkee:
“Divide and Dissolve’s art practice includes decolonising, decentralising, disestablishing, and destroying white supremacy,” they said. “With our video for ‘Resistance’ we are drawing attention to the memorialisation of genocide, slavery, rape, murder, cultural genocide, and ecocide.
“The people commenting with hate are clearly displaying the fact that we do not live in a society free from white supremacy, and are perpetrating everything we stand against.”
This isn’t the first time that colonial monuments have been the focus of Indigenous protest. Last August, a statue of James Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park was spray-painted with “change the date” and “no pride in genocide”.
In the aftermath, Prime Minister Turnbull equated the act to totalitarianism, and the Federal Government pushed to have several statues of James Cook listed on the National Heritage List, meaning that defacing the statues could result in jail time, and fines of up to $88,000.
You can watch the music video for Divide and Dissolve’s ‘Resistance’ below.
Update: As of 24 May, the ‘Resistance’ video has returned to Youtube, as reported by Music Feeds. Youtube have released a statement in which they call the deletion a “mistake” due to the sheer number of videos they assess daily, and upon re-permitting the video have instead put it behind an age-restriction wall.