The 2025 People’s Blockade was the largest and most disruptive mobilisation Rising Tide has ever done. With over 8,000 people, 181 arrests, 10 coal ships rescheduled and THREE turned around, this marks the beginning of the next phase of our powerful movement. 

Week by week, year by year, we're grinding unrelentingly deeper into the climate crisis as innocent people all over the world are killed by increasing climate disasters. Whilst the Albanese government is engaging in a slow march to domestic renewables, it is business as usual for coal and gas exports, and exports from the world's largest coal port. Until this weekend. 

The police arrived with a massive counter-terrorism taskforce intent on penning us in behind a line of buoys; we arrived in our THOUSANDS ready with kayaks, paddles and deep conviction.

On Saturday 29 Nov 2025, as hundreds took to the water and a coal ship started heading into port, decoys distracted police attention, and then from 3 separate entry points kayakers, a boat, and swimmers entered the shipping channel. We claimed back our harbour and the 228 metre-long bulk carrier Cemtex Leader was forced to turn around. 

On Sunday 30 Nov 2025, a troupe of swimmers took the channel and almost managed to turn around another coal ship. Meanwhile, our friends at Greenpeace had locked onto the next coal ship anchored out at sea, holding it in place for SEVEN HOURS which stopped it from entering port. 

And then, on Sunday afternoon almost 200 people in kayaks entered the shipping channel in a tsunami of civil disobedience. A third coal ship was turned around!

We called the head to the NSW Port Authority to confirm what we thought: we’d successfully blockaded coal ships for the weekend and no more were coming.

People power had won. The port had claimed the legal right to send through coal ships while we claimed the moral right to stop them. The port initially scheduled 15 coal ships over the weekend; then they cut it to five; and in the end, we stopped all but two.

But just when the port thought it was all over, on Monday 1 Dec 2025, 16 people locked onto coal loaders and conveyors forcing coal operations to stop for three and a half hours!

As the climate crisis escalates so must we. We've just demonstrated the capacity to seriously disrupt the world's largest coal port in a way that cannot be ignored and which charts the path for 2026.

The People’s Blockade spread our message far and wide, and we did it together, with joy and hope. We danced together to incredible live music from Lime Cordiale and The Herd and so many more, we connected deeply, we shared food together and we grew our strong community.

Thank you to EVERY SINGLE volunteer and attendee who helped make history in 2025.

Now it’s time to step it up. Let’s carry this courage forward and turn the spark of the Blockade into a fire that transforms 2026 and beyond.