about peacebus.com

Peacebus.com was both a colourful and crusading Toyota Coaster and this website which promotes and has recorded its adventures.

Veteran peace campaigner Graeme Dunstan was Peacebus' mission commander. His faithful followers were Jennifer, Molly and Jolly.

For each mission a crew of volunteers was enlisted from friends and random strangers encountered along the way.

Peacebus was originally a gift to Rainbow Region social activism by Tony Spanos, defacto street major of South Sydney and the proprietor of the legendary, Grafitti Hall of Fame. 'French' Sam Bernard of the Nimbin HEMP Embassy's famous Hemp Bar was its first benefactor.

Artists Elspeth Jones and Helen Rodriguez painted the murals on the bus - on one side the Nimbin rocks, and on the other, Timbarra sacred mountain. For each mission new livery and banners were prepared.

On 2 September 2002 Peacebus was wrecked on the Pacific Highway on its way to the NSW Parliament in Sydney to bear witness for endangered species. The Toyota Coaster was written off but retrieved from the wreckers yard and patched up. Now too battered and ridden with mechanical problems to be re-registered, the old girl is parked in Nimbin, a memorial to its former glory.

During its three years of active campaigning, Graeme imagined an introduction being written to the The Chronicles of Peacebus.comin a 100 years time reading something like this:

"At the beginning of the 21 century, all the so-called worker's states had been vanquished by so called market forces. The ambitions of the rapacious rich and their management elites seemed without obstruction and without frontier.

"A new tyranny of the super rich took hold and the gains in social conditions won by the social reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries were being systematically undone. Democracy, once the great hope of liberty, had become the best government money could buy.

"Like all previous tyrannies of the rich, the magnitude of the greed of 21st century tyranny was matched only by that of its ruthlessness and its armed might. What was new about this tyranny was that the new technology of communication, trade and war had made the reach of its piracy, propoganda and oppression both global and at the same time intimately domestic.

"Every home had a TV set and the medium was the massage. The reach and thrall of the US propoganda and war machine seemed absolute.

"But liberty lives in the heart; freedom is a yearning ever reborn and oppression is liberty's midwife. The US propoganda illusion seemed absolute but it was only an illusion, a bad stretch of the imagination and ever ill fitting on a world of change and chaos.

"As with previous liberation movements, change did not come from the centre. It could only come from the margins, from the chaos, the cracks and the contradictions in the old regime, first heard in small voices and from those furthest from power and influence, but close to the poor, the dispossessed and the suffering.

"It was an old road and yet a new one and there were no maps. The times demanded new pathways, new skills and new tactics and another generation pioneers. No one knew the best way to proceed. There was just the courage of the early waking grievers, the example of the ancestors, the needs of the times, the will to begin and the creativity of the moment.

"In that time, Peacebus.com was one such marginal voice ..."

Peacebus.com lives on as this website and as matter made spirit.

Graeme continues to be active for peace, justice and the Earth, but a little less driven and, in a plain white 1995 Mitsubishi L300 van he calls Happy Wheels, a little less flambouyantly.

It may be that Peacebus will roll again with a new bus. A pile of cash donations would make the difference. Every bit counts but $10,000 is needed to get a suitable bus and $50 will fill the tank and take it about 200 km along the road.

Make cheques out to Peacebus.com and send them to P.O. Box 37 NIMBIN 2480 Australia or Direct Deposit into the Summerland Credit Union
Branch Number = 802222
Account Number = 40883 S1.1

If you want to be kept informed about the further adventures of Peacebus.com, send us an email and your name will be added to the email list for all our media releases, notices of actions and reports of those actions.

For peace! For justice ! For the Earth!

 


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