ABSTRACT
12 September 2000: The Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games is just three days away and an estimated 22,000 journalists have descended on Sydney for the largest programmed media event on the calendar. During the Games, journalists will be able to draw on the resources of the International Broadcast Centre atHomebush Bay, with its 3200 staff, 70,000 square metres of TV broadcast facilities, joo cameras and 400 video machines. And that's just for broadcasters, with hundreds of additional staff and thousands of volunteers deployed to assist print journalists. 1 But not everyone has such resources. In a converted warehouse in the inner-western suburb of St Peters, the Sydney Independent Media Centre (IMC) is also gearing up for the Games. 2 Sharing the building with an anarchist bookshop, an office of Friends of the Earth and some residents, a dozen computers line the room. Some are hand-painted or stickered, having been donated or salvaged from dumpsters. Volunteer contributors cluster around terminals, typing up stories and helping each other upload video and audio files. Spare monitors and disk drives in various states of repair are piled on shelves, jostling for space with Linux penguin dolls, an anti-uranium mining flag, and banners reading ‘do-it-yourself media’ and ‘cause for comment’. With its scraps of taped-down carpet and mismatched chairs, the IMC resembles a garage band rehearsal space, a model of DIY culture, makeshift and make-do. The IMC, observes volunteer Gabrielle Kuiper, ‘runs on the smell of a burnt-out modem’.
