When The World Said No To War

When The World Said No To War is a photographic exhibition and peace education forum inspired by the 35 million people who took to the streets in Febuary 2003 to protest the impending war in Iraq.

The aim of the project is to highlight the significance of the largest peace demonstrations in history and to contribute to the ongoing call for peace.

The photographs were first exhibited in Sydney in 2005 and are being shown again now, 5 years after the start of the Iraq war, as part of a suite of programming related to the exhibition The 1970s: a decade of protest - photography by Roger Scott at the Museum of Sydney.

"Although it may be difficult to envisage an end to war as a form of political behaviour, there was a time when people could not foresee an end to slavery, the emancipation of women, the vote for blacks or the end of apatheid, but these things came to pass. Not because some magnamious government or world body decreed them to be so, but because ordniary citizens said it should be so. We need not be Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Martin Luther King Jnr, or Gandhi, for none of those people effected change alone; behind each stood millions of likeminded individuals with their own acts of moral courage. Our strength lies in the recognition of this - our shared humanity - rather than in the seperation imposed by the constructs of the state, religion and ethnicity."
Dr. Denise Leith, Bearing Witness : The Lives of War Correspondents and Photojournalists

"One little person giving all her time to peace, can make news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history."
Peace Pilgrim

See the Photographs