16
‘WE’RE ALL GREENIES NOW’
DAYS AND MONTHS of theatres, sports halls and arenas unfolded in a blur. In the slingshot of a 747 everything is fleeting: one moment you’re in America, and it’s loud and tastes of sugar; a day later you’re in cool Scandinavia, and there are no poor people. We were following through on an album that was making headway, but it was hard to get grounded, and exactly what it was we were chasing was less clear.
The message we were receiving from the record company was clear: all you have to do is get another song away just like ‘Beds Are Burning’, just like the one that made the charts. But chasing that particular rainbow was never going to deliver in the long run, I was certain of that. Maybe that was why I kept one of the US record company bigwigs waiting while I finished eating a meal after a late show in New York one night. We’d been told it was critical to meet this particular senior vice-president so as to get some executive support at a crucial stage of our career—something we didn’t normally lose sleep over. In this instance, though, Gary was apoplectic and Rob was annoyed; the rest of the band shrugged it off as Pete being Pete.
I wasn’t being intentionally rude. More likely it was psychological, me sending a message that I wasn’t in thrall to the gladhanding coming our way and my mind was elsewhere.
Having spent so much time at 35,000 feet, I’d grown used to peering down at the world from this vantage point—and it put me in mind of the new perspective granted to the world when the Apollo space missions started up. Space travel had given us a snapshot of what was at stake in a defining image of the century. There it was: a perfect blue ball, covered in flurries of white and green, suspended in space, with inky blackness all around. And visible from way up on high was the diaphanous spread of light from powered-up cities, a band of white Antarctic ice on the perimeter, a continent-sized arc of coloured coral across the South Pacific lapping our shore—miracle glimpses of life due to collide in our lifetime. The pictures from space said it all—it’s small and fragile and it’s the only one we’ve got.
Meanwhile each puff of smoke from exhaust pipes and chimneys and power plants chomping fuel keeps on coalescing. There’s a big brown cloud hovering. It hangs, thickening the air—a heat blanket wrapped around the globe.
Everything seemed to be in jeopardy. Yet marshalling the will and the wherewithal to deliver a safe future was proving hard.
Coming in to land at São Paulo, Brazil, a descent that took more than half an hour over the biggest city I’d ever seen, and looking down on a spaghetti tangle of roads and shanty-town shacks and massive apartments stretching past the horizon, made me pause for breath. As did sitting in the back of the tour bus looking out on the San Diego freeway, eight lanes of unceasing, smoking, grumbling traffic extending both ways past the eyeline, a sea of cars and bulky chassis, with smog so thick I could hardly make out the prefab suburbs that lie on either side of the huge road.
All I could think at times like these was: are we at some kind of tipping point?
It seemed clear that new, fresh approaches were desperately needed to get us out of the old way of thinking; we needed to make the blue planet, not our immediate desires, a priority. But what could I do?
I could head back to the river in Lane Cove National Park where I’d played as a kid, pull some wrecked car bodies out of the bush, pick up the piles of cans and broken bottles—that would be a start.
Instead, I ended up somewhere altogether different.
…
It was only a year or so before that I’d hitched a ride with lawyer Phillip Toyne out to Warakurna in his tiny single-engine plane while on the Blackfella/Whitefella tour.
As we flew low over the Gunbarrel Highway—a thin red line of dirt snaking below us—he mentioned over the engine roar that he was thinking of applying for the position of executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), a big environmental organisation headquartered in Melbourne.
I thought it was a good idea. After all, he’d laboured successfully in one of the remotest and toughest spots imaginable, acting on behalf of Aboriginal people seeking land rights in the face of resistance from the Northern Territory administration and local graziers.
With the support of ACF president Hal Wootten, who had founded the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law and then become a judge, Phillip duly got the job and set about making the foundation a stronger force at a time when threats to the environment were breaking out across the country.
Now Wootten was due to retire and Phillip, along with vice-president Penny Figgis, was convinced the organisation needed to become more politically focused and extend its reach to younger Australians. In early 1989 he called me to see if I’d be interested in the position.
I figured I could work with Toyne. He was pragmatic, with a brooding manner and a sharp legal brain, but you got the feeling he’d have a go at anything if given half a chance. The ruling body of the ACF—the council—was split. The fundamentalist old guard baulked at the thought of appointing as their head someone from the world of entertainment who was younger than most of them. But eventually I got the nod and away we went. Here was something solid to get my teeth into at a time when it felt like the hourglass was running down.
The ACF had been founded in the 1960s, when the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland was pushing to allow oil drilling on the Great Barrier Reef. This was a bridge too far, even for some Liberal Party supporters. The foundation was established with a bipartisan stance by, among others, the Liberal politician Malcolm Fraser, who would go on to become prime minister in the 1970s. Sir Garfield Barwick, a Liberal minister and, later, a controversial chief justice of the High Court, was chosen as president. He was followed by a procession of other luminaries, including H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs and the royal consort, Prince Philip.
Over time the organisation had grown in clout. The conservative founders had been replaced by environmentalists, many with strong campaigning backgrounds, and by the mid-1980s the ACF was on its way to becoming the nation’s most respected national environmental organisation.
The 1972 decision by the Tasmanian Liberal government to flood Lake Pedder, an exquisite lake surrounded by glorious tall forests and with pristine white-sand beaches, had met with significant resistance, but the dam was still built.
Forest wars were breaking out across the country as the public became incensed by long-standing logging practices that were decimating swathes of native forests. Plans for massive real-estate development in the Daintree Rainforest in Far North Queensland also caught the Oils’ attention. A new generation of activists was mobilising and the ACF was increasingly being called on to act as the public face of the environmental lobby.
In the international arena, there was a growing push to take the environment seriously. The 1987 report, Our Common Future, by the former prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, argued the time was right for ‘sustainable development’, marrying the goals of continuing economic growth (to help relieve poverty) with more stringent measures to protect the global environment, now showing signs of permanent decline.
Up until this point, the ACF’s modus operandi was one of measured deliberation, focused on lobbying governments and providing critiques of government policy. But now with more and more flash points around the environment forming, the foundation needed to modernise quickly, interact more closely with government and get directly involved with the issues of the day.
Elected by the foundation’s members, the ACF council was a disparate collection of utopians, nature lovers, pragmatists, revolutionaries, dreamers and obsessives. It was the organisation’s pinnacle policymaking body, whose work often set the standard for smaller environmental organisations. Sitting around the collection of trestle tables pushed together to accommodate the fifty or so councillors and staff who gathered when council met were prominent environmentalists of the day, including: Jack Mundey, who’d led the Green Bans in Sydney; Milo Dunphy, son of t
he esteemed New South Wales conservationist Miles Dunphy (father and son both indefatigable proponents of national parks); Queenslander Rosemary Hill, a key figure in the battle to save the Daintree Rainforest; and John Sinclair, who spearheaded the fight to save Fraser Island from sand mining. There were many others who were active in state or local community environmental issues, as well as future leaders of the minor parties: from South Australia there were the Democrats’ John Coulter and Meg Lees, and future Greens party leader Christine Milne stopped over for a term or two.
The ACF relied on members’ donations and small grants from government, so resources were always stretched, and resolving competing demands for limited funds, including from the membership, was a tough task—especially early on, when the council had few members with financial or marketing experience.
At times the ACF could be a capricious and contradictory beast, and some issues, like population, were controversial and difficult to manage. As the new president, I was required to chair council meetings which had a track record of veering off topic and delivering peculiar decisions.
At one meeting, in the Hawthorn Town Hall, we arrived to find a handful of zero-population-growth activists gathered on the steps. One, wearing a baby’s bonnet, had folded himself inside a large cane shopping basket. They had come to urge councillors to support a limit to Australia’s population. It wasn’t easy to have a sensible debate with someone in a cane basket—did anyone say basket case?—and it didn’t get any easier inside the meeting, with strident calls for the ACF to consider a policy that would have the effect of mandating the number of children a couple could have. Much like the Chinese government with their one-child policy, it would see Australia’s population decline.
Meanwhile, other councillors, especially those with migrant backgrounds, took umbrage at the fortress Australia mentality that underlay the zero-population-growth arguments. A heated debate erupted and lasted all morning, by which time the meaning of life was being canvassed too, and the precious time set aside for other urgent matters had been frittered away.
Eventually a compromise of sorts, familiar to any student of politics—the agree-to-disagree option—was reached. The foundation would call on the major political parties to develop a population policy that took the environment into account, to encourage (hopefully) a mature national debate on the issue. Twenty years later, federal Labor produced such a document, but the distance between those who believe we should drastically reduce population levels, and others, especially business groups, who believe an even larger population is desirable, means we are still way off a sensible conversation about how many people should call Australia home.
Keeping the ACF ship afloat meant ensuring the organisation was solvent, and I felt it was financially irresponsible to approve a deficit budget simply because councillors kept insisting that their favourite campaign items be added, meaning a greater workload for staff but with fewer resources. Eventually I resorted to scheduling the budget as the first item for Sunday morning, confident that the furious socialising of a Saturday night in Melbourne—a rare experience for interstate greenies—would take its toll. As people straggled in, bleary-eyed and clutching cups of coffee, the budget was usually approved intact and without too much fuss.
Despite these quirks, much of the work of the council was of enormous value and, in many cases, well ahead of its time. The ACF played a prominent and constructive role in most of the major environmental issues of the period. Policy development in areas like biodiversity protection, public transport, managing World Heritage areas and national parks, sustainable use of native forests, and environmental tax reform set a template for the environment to be taken more seriously by governments and the broader community. In the case of climate change, a 1968 edition of the ACF monthly magazine, Habitat, laid out the consequences of increased greenhouse gas emissions and made suggestions, entirely relevant today, as to what needed to be done to address dangerous climate change.
If you wanted to learn and work with a highly motivated and experienced group of passionate environmentalists, the staff and council of the ACF were hard to beat.
…
While building our shed in Kangaroo Valley, I’d started taking the girls for day trips down to Jervis Bay, a beautiful, relatively unspoiled stretch of coast south of Sydney. The bay contained plenty of evidence of Aboriginal people’s occupation, with many prehistoric rock shelters, shell middens and stone-flaking sites. The list of its environmental attributes was impressive: clean water of exceptionally high quality, healthy seagrass communities, and an abundance of fish, dolphins and penguins, as well as occasional humpback whales seeking shelter while migrating with their young. The foreshore of the bay and beyond supported mangroves and rainforest, heath and open forest, all important habitats for native species of birds and animals.
In the past, parts of Jervis Bay had been earmarked for industry, with plans for port expansion and, of all things—considering how far it was from Sydney and Melbourne—a chemicals plant. The southern side of the bay at Murrays Beach had even been chosen in the early 1970s as the best location for Australia’s first large-scale nuclear reactor. While the nuclear plant didn’t go ahead, a car park built for construction workers is still there to this day.
The northern peninsula was rimmed with a series of pure white-sand beaches separated by small rock platforms and outcrops. High cliffs bestrode the entrance to the bay, gazing imperiously down on the ocean. Because a section of the peninsula served as a weapons-firing range for the defence forces and was owned by the Commonwealth government, the whole area was relatively free of development. There is some irony in the fact that defence lands are often located in areas with high environmental qualities, and that these areas are therefore off limits to local and state governments, and developers. This was an important factor in the subsequent fight to save Jervis Bay, and a number of later campaigns I was involved with.
On the southern perimeter of the bay were several small hamlets, and on the ocean side an Aboriginal settlement called Wreck Bay. Here, the main threat to Jervis Bay’s natural beauty was uncontrolled real-estate development through continuing land subdivisions, where adequate controls to protect significant native bushland and to stop run-off entering the bay’s pristine waters were unlikely to be imposed by the local Shoalhaven Council. This body typically included a coven of redneck farmers, right-wing small-business types who saw any kind of development as a boon to the economy and, not surprisingly, real-estate agents who could stand to benefit from any decision the council might make to rezone land.
A more serious threat to the northern expanse of the bay had emerged with plans by the Department of Defence to locate an armaments depot, to store the navy’s ammunition, in thick bushland on the peninsula to the south of the firing range. There were plans to construct a massive wharf at the preferred location, Cabbage Tree Point, with associated roads, concrete bays and warehouses in which to store the bombs and ammunition once they were taken off navy vessels when they returned from duty or were decommissioned. Associated with the proposal to build this large weapons-storage facility was a longer-term plan for the entire naval fleet to be relocated from its headquarters in Sydney to Jervis Bay.
When a major threat to the environment looms, it is often local groups who respond first. These citizens are sometimes denigrated as NIMBYs (not in my backyard), but the fact is they are usually highly motivated to protect a place they know intimately and often play a key role in raising public awareness and building support for a campaign.
In 1981, the Jervis Bay Protection Committee had been formed. A small group comprising teachers, retirees and assorted nature enthusiasts, the committee had stoically countered the raft of proposals for Jervis Bay put up by successive governments—none of which appeared to take the outstanding natural values of the bay into account. But as is often the case, the local group lacked the resources of its larger and more powerful opponents. In this case, the defence department was an i
mplacable and immoveable force, and it was committed to the move.
After visiting the area a couple of times, it had become clear to me that the only way this massive proposal could possibly be stopped in its tracks was to go national. This meant using the media to draw attention to the defence department’s plans and encouraging national environmental organisations to lend their weight to the issue, to be followed by intense lobbying of key decision-makers, asking them to reconsider—a long shot in the circumstances.
I’d stayed in touch with a couple who were leading activists from the NDP period, Paul Gilding and Michelle Grosvenor. They’d been involved with the Sydney Peace Squadron, a gung-ho group who’d protested the presence of nuclear weapons on visiting American naval vessels by taking to Sydney Harbour in small boats and canoes, and on surfboards. Paul’s background was very different to mine. He’d left school early and ended up living and working in Aboriginal communities in Queensland, spent some time as a union organiser and then served in the air force. He was self-taught and had a determined, practical air about him—over time a good friendship grew between us.
We set about establishing the National Save Jervis Bay Campaign, with Paul, who was at a loose end, taking on the position of national coordinator. Barrister Tim Robertson provided legal advice and, with support from the Oils—who were happy to see their lead singer usefully occupied—and operating out of our office in Glebe, we were set to go. Inaugurated as a national coalition, the campaign included the local Jervis Bay Protection Committee, the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Council and other like-minded organisations who could be persuaded to join.
As the new ACF president, I was keen for the foundation to get more involved, but the first few council meetings had alerted me to the problem of the ACF taking on too many issues. A strong case would have to be made for involvement this late in the day. In the end, though, the arguments for the bay’s protection were unassailable, and this, along with the local branch’s history of involvement in the issue, supported by ACF members in Canberra, saw the foundation join up. But little could be provided in the way of resources, so along with the Jervis Bay Protection Committee and a few volunteers, Paul and I, for the most part, worked alone.
Big Blue Sky Page 21
