A contemporary website promoting the S11 protests (Image: Supplied)

It was 20 years ago today -- again, again -- that several thousand people, including your correspondent, gathered at the junction of the Queens' Bridge and City Road, Melbourne out front of the black-polished behemoth of Crown Casino, to perform a mass citizen's arrest of a gang of international criminals...

... Or the WEF, the World Economic Forum as it was and is known -- the Davos crowd, the crew of prime ministers, CEOs, elite bureaucrats, spare Bonos, tame academics and a very few dissenters.

Outside, with several layers of cyclone fencing in between, were 10,000 protesters, give or take -- the rag tag army of the anti-globalisation movement; activists, students, high school kids, all in that "explosion in an op-shop" style of the day; together with trade unionists, with big CFMEU and maritime union contingents, Vietnam (protest) vets, lefty academics and teachers, the masked shadows of the anarchist "black bloc", and any number of people who'd just heard about it on the radio (a popular device of the time) and thought they might go along.