On Remembrance Day four years ago, on a bus from Caulfield to Highett in Melbourne’s south-east, Mike Nayna filmed a fellow passenger’s racist, sexist tirade and posted it to YouTube. The video was viewed more than 4m times and made headlines around the world.
Today, Nayna likens it to a “nuke”. “It got a lot of collateral damage in the end.”
That fallout is the subject of Digilante, a half-hour documentary that airs on ABC2 on Wednesday night. Nayna interviews Fanny Desaintjores, the French tourist targeted by the man, and Hayden Stewart, who was charged for his part in the pile-on, and confronts his ambivalence about his own role in the resulting media circus.
Nayna’s footage was viewed 1m times in less than two weeks, spurring a manhunt for the perpetrators held up at home and abroad as the worst face of Australia. That Nayna refers to the passenger as only “the red-faced man” in the documentary is a small acknowledgement of the damage already done: it is not difficult to find his name online.
David Graham’s tirade is striking in its explicit aggression – he threatens to cut Desaintjores’ breasts off with a filleting knife and calls her friends “fucking black cunts”, among a wide-reaching spray of violence – and its mobilising effect on his fellow passengers.
By the end of the excruciating trip, the bus has split into distinct, primal tribes. Stewart, riding with his wife and baby daughter in a pram, tells Desaintjores he’ll cut her with a box-cutter and smashes a window as he disembarks.
Eight months later, in July, both Graham and Stewart were charged, with Graham – considered the “primary offender” by the magistrate – subsequently sentenced to 21 days’ prison.
You might think that, with a conviction, the video had achieved its purpose. But Nayna’s principal feeling was of guilt. “I hadn’t spent enough time thinking about why that was – I just hated the thought of it.”
Filming the exchange both simplified the situation and exacerbated it, says Nayna. What Graham said was “horrible, the worst stuff ever” – at the same time, Nayna doubts he intended to act on it. “In the context of the bus, he just wanted a friend … He’s like an unskilled comedian, going with the audience.”
Nayna was also closer to Graham than Desaintjores, who was secure within a large group of friends. She later told media that she did not feel scared for her safety, only harassed.
“It’s such a strange thing, the established narrative now in all sorts of stories is there’s an assumed victim,” Nayna says. “But I made those assumptions and I played with that to make the video viral, so I’m as guilty as anyone in the media.”
At the time, Nayna was working in digital marketing. As much as Graham’s outburst had angered him, he approached the video as he would any other job: with view to making it go as big as possible.
“I had a brief, you know. I had to keep it to under three minutes, I had to make it as emotional as possible, there’s all these factors.”
Where did this brief come from?
“Me.” He laughs. “I mean, in order for it to go viral, the world is giving me the brief. Like, you have to do certain things to make things move on the internet.”
It seems like you have to do fewer things now, with “public transport rant” an established category of viral video. As guilty as he may feel about the part he played in Graham’s vilification, in Digilante Nayna positions himself as something of a pioneer of the genre, calling out subsequent “copycat” clips.
His video birthed a meme, he says, in the truest sense of the word: an easily shared unit of cultural ideas. Sharing Nayna’s video – even his own act of shooting it – was a shortcut to condemning the racism and misogyny it depicted.
“You see a headline and then two seconds of footage and you’re like, ‘Whoa, that person is racist, that person is a misogynist,’ or whatever.
“But then it’s like, ‘Well, all right, someone had to film them. There’s probably four minutes either side of that two seconds that I saw, there’s an instigating factor here, there’s that person’s life.’
“There are so many frameworks that get snipped down to get the most easily transmissible story.”
Nayna, who self-identifies as brown, says it was only recently that he realised his motivation for making the video was revenge – along with no small amount of ego. “I was a different person back then and I was angry. Making the video was really cathartic … It didn’t feel like revenge when I was doing it, it felt right, you know. I felt like, I don’t know, a soldier of karma.
“Now that I look back at it, it just looks to me like a big, horrible mess of a thing.”
Yet it fit so neatly into familiar narratives. With Graham the villain, Desaintjores the victim, the obvious role for Nayna was hero. For a time he embraced it, appearing in media around the world to talk about his experience.
“It took a long time for me to figure out that what I was doing was playing the character that everyone wanted me to play,” he says. “The first-person experience is that ‘I’m doing something just’ – you actually believe that ... but, subconsciously, it’s likely that it’s just about attention and taking the moral high ground, which is really ‘cool’ now.”
Well, in what other circumstances would you have been called upon to give your take on race relations?
He laughs. “Exactly. I’m brown and I’m on a bus when some racist shit goes down. All of a sudden, I’m Reverend Al Sharpton of Australia.”
Public shaming – even if it achieve results – gives only the illusion of positive change, Nayna says. “Whether subconsciously or consciously, it’s about people climbing social hierarchies – that’s all it is, really. If you genuinely wanted to change things, you’d do small things. You’d clean your room, see if your neighbour wants something.
“You’re not going to change the world by writing a blog.”
Digilante offers no answers; Nayna says he has none to give. But it does give more context to his three-minute clip, dismantling the narrative established in the months, then years, after Nayna uploaded his video.
Desaintjores does not consider herself a victim; Stewart, for his part, was in that win-or-lose mindset that comes from being newly out of prison. He only agreed to be interviewed after Nayna ran into him by chance outside his Collingwood apartment.
“His expression was like he was expecting a hit,” Nayna says. “Like a stranger comes up to this man, he expects them to hit him – that’s the kind of world this guy’s living in.”
The one voice missing from Digilante is that of Graham, in some ways its central character. That was not for want of trying, Nayna says.
“He’s completely off the grid … I wouldn’t be surprised if he changed his name or moved to Queensland or something like that,” he says. “He’s certainly not on the internet, anyway.”
• Digilante – produced with assistance from Screen Australia, the ABC and Film Victoria – will air on Wednesday 21 December at 9.30pm AEDT on ABC2.
