When the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise came to Hobart he went and sat on top of Mount Wellington in hail and snow, fasting till the ship moored far below in the Derwent departed, a protest nearly sabotaged by a cousin who poked a cheese sandwich into his tent. Unlike his letter, the doctor’s unusual action, which combined landscape, passion and non-violent protest in a highly theatrical gesture, attracted national attention.
What next happened is conventionally told as a tale of a near-mystical journey into the wilderness, of how while rafting the little known Franklin River in 1976, he was inspired to his passionate leadership and consequent fame as the personification of the battle to save that same river from destruction, the man known as Bob Brown.
But Bob Brown had already been changed by the people he met in Tasmania, most particularly those conservationists clustered around the world’s first Green party, the United Tasmania Group (UTG), formed in 1972 to save Lake Pedder. Even then, the Tasmanian Green movement was the most dynamic and radical in the country.
It is not possible to understand Brown without understanding the UTG. In Tasmania the environment movement was never just a battle for this or that piece of dirt. Rather, each issue from Pedder onwards, as the poet Pete Hay has observed, was a prism through which the invisible light of a century and a half of hope and despair of a people was refracted into a glorious rainbow of future possibilities. At its beginning the Green movement was about the search of the withered soul of Tasmania for redemption.
While much has been made in the media of how the Greens have finally gone beyond being a pack of hippy tree huggers, the reality is that they never were, and the Australian Greens now in so many ways represent a full turning of the circle back to the New Ethic of the UTG, the world’s first coherent Green manifesto that was social and political as much as it was environmental, and which made such an impact on the young doctor from New South Wales.
‘Finding the UTG,’ Brown has written, ‘was, for me, like being let out of the prison of conventional thinking.’ Brown stood unsuccessfully as a UTG senate candidate in 1975, garnering only 182 votes, and even more unsuccessfully for the Tasmanian parliament in 1976, when he gained only 13 votes.
Though he forgot to vote for himself, he never forgot watching from the gallery of the Tasmanian parliament as both sides of politics voted to flood Pedder, and his belief that the environment needed its own party never thereafter left him. Those who are constantly surprised at his effectiveness as a politician forget how long he has been playing the game, how unlike many mainland environmental groups the Tasmanian Greens never fudged the issue of power. For them, for him, in spite of all the dilemmas it represents, acquiring power is how you change the world. There are no other choices.
By 1976 he was living in a little weatherboard cottage at Liffey beneath Drys Bluff, the snappy doctor now Don Quixote dressed in a new motley of old trousers, heavy boots, open-necked shirts and jumpers. The new environmental battleground was the remaining undammed reaches of the Gordon River and its tributaries—the Jane, Denison and, most portentously, the Franklin rivers of south-west Tasmania.
At a weekend meeting at Brown’s Liffey cottage, a new group was formed with a much smaller ambition than the UTG. Rather than save the world, the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS) aimed only to save what remained of the south-west Tasmanian wilderness. Brown began metamorphosing a second time into the Gandhi of the Rivers, Australian of the Year, Saint Bob of the Wilderness.
The Franklin campaign changed Tasmania, brought the ALP to power federally, and was the beginning of a golden period for the Greens. Never forgetting the lessons of the UTG, Brown spent the 1980s transforming the successes of a pressure group into a broad-based political party, slowly building up a Tasmanian green organisation and its parliamentary representation, culminating in the Greens scoring 18 per cent of the vote in Tasmania at the 1989 state elections and winning the balance of power, becoming the first red–green alliance to govern outside of Germany. His focus was as much international as local, and he built close friendships with the likes of Ralph Nader, David Suzuki and Petra Kelly.
But following the collapse of the Tasmanian Labor–Green Accord in the early 1990s, the withering of federal ALP support for environmental issues, the rise of Howard, the increasingly effective combination of anti-Green propaganda and new legislation that saw forestry protesters fined thousands of dollars or imprisoned for months, the Green movement, not always helped by its own arrogance and self-aggrandisement, experienced defeat and collapse. An attempt to merge the disparate Green groups around the nation with the Democrats to form a national Green party failed. Internationally, the early promise of the Greens similarly faded. Brown’s close friend, Petra Kelly, one-time hero of the German Greens, died tragically, her body not found for several days.
Brown had publicly declared himself gay in 1976, but during the years of the Franklin battle he was often portrayed as an asexual ascetic, a monastic figure who existed beyond physical needs and who sublimated his desires in a passion for wilderness.
But however much the issue of Brown’s sexuality was pushed away by his supporters, it was brought to the fore by his opponents. In the wake of the Greens’ triumph in the 1989 Tasmanian elections, a ferocious anti-gay movement was created by far right groups in Tasmania’s depressed north-west, given succour by some Liberal politicians. The real target, of course, was not gays, but the Greens, seeking to destroy the character of their leader Brown.
The attack had unexpected consequences. Some young Tasmanian gay activists led by Rodney Croome and Nick Toonen filled a bus and went to the anti-gay rallies, showing courage not dissimilar to that of the freedom rides of the civil rights battles.
Their hero and model was Bob Brown. As a teenager, Croome had bought Peter Thompson’s 1984 biography of Brown, in order, he says, to read over and over the two paragraphs that said he was gay. He hid the book at the back of his bookshelf in his Devonport home.
For such young gays, Brown showed them how it was possible to be both Tasmanian and gay, an identity perhaps best summed up in a bumper sticker of the time: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going to the mainland.’ Brown advised them on tactics, showed Rodney Croome how to write his first press release, but refused to be publicly drawn too closely into the battle, worrying that it might detract from their efforts, worried also that it might detract from his environmental battles, a decision he now wonders was right or not.
Through the early 1990s the Tasmanian gays fought a long, difficult battle, their campaign modelled on that of the Greens’ traditional campaigns in Tasmania, taking the issue of gay rights first to state, then national and finally international forums for resolution.
Brown feels he owes them a great debt. Because of them he was finally able to publicly acknowledge his sexuality as integral rather than separate and subordinate to his political struggles, as he had argued in the 1980s. And perhaps it is because of them that in 1996, at the age of fifty-one, he found what he had evaded yet yearned for all his adult life: a man with whom he could live.
In a backroom full of light above his Tibetan rug shop in central Hobart, I meet Bob Brown’s now long-time partner, Paul Thomas. A shy yet genial and open man, he shares similarities of character as well as similarities of upbringing with Bob Brown: a country childhood in the Huon Valley south of Hobart in a religious family—his Catholic, Brown’s Presbyterian.
Paul Thomas talks of Bob Brown’s closeness to his twin sister and two brothers, of his generosity, giving anyone and everyone whatever he has, a generosity that sees strangers come up and thank him for gifts of money made ten years or more before. He and Brown have been together since, in Paul Thomas’ words, they took a walk together on the eve of Brown’s return to politics, his election as a Tasmanian senator in the 1996 election.
Since that time Brown’s concerns have grown. Though environment
al issues continued to loom large, he was the first federal parliamentarian to continually speak out against mandatory sentencing, and he argued strongly on other social issues such as public education and civil liberties that the ALP were abandoning in their race to outcompete the Liberals as true conservatives. In the manner he had built a Tasmanian Green Party in the 1980s he now also set out to build a cohesive and electorally successful Australian Green party, the consequences of which are only now beginning to be apparent.
Four days after the federal election that saw the Australian Greens emerge as a significant new force in Australian politics, I visit Bob Brown. I find the man described as the new leader of the opposition looking exhausted, his long face heavily lined. I tell him how I have been given thirty-six hours to write a large piece on him, and that I am feeling seasick from gazing out over the ocean of such a storm-tossed life.
Imagine how I feel, he says, and we both laugh about that and then about many other things. I have no idea how you are meant to conduct an interview, particularly with someone you have known off and on for twenty years, so instead we simply swap stories.
He laughs a great deal, and says laughter is the greatest strength an activist can have. But he has also the courage that has endured beatings, imprisonment, bullets in the post, and the less obvious but perhaps more corrosive horror of ongoing hatred: of his politics and his sexuality.
Like all people described as charismatic, Bob Brown is in the flesh reassuringly ordinary in presence and manner. The son of a policeman who grew up in country New South Wales, Bob Brown has about him many of those paradoxes sometimes called old Australia: a coupling of genuine warmth and a polite reserve; a laconic manner and broad accent that some find gauche and others charming; a country slowness in conversation; a notorious vagueness of language that disguises a quick and sharp mind.
He has what Les Murray in a famous poem about fellow country New South Welshmen defined as sprawl: an elusive largeness of spirit that finds its expression not so much in words but in actions. Both his mother and father came to Bob’s Liffey home to die, nursed through the twilight of their lives in the lee of the great Western Tiers by their son.
Our talk veers to politics, of how the Greens seem to have taken over the vast field of the left, abandoned as suddenly and unexpectedly by the ALP as the Taliban fleeing Kabul by night. The Greens’ rhetoric has altered: the rights of refugees, the needs of public education, the plight of the poor all rate as significantly as traditional environmental issues. Heroic figures of the old ALP, such as Tom Uren, came and campaigned for Brown during the election.
The public image of Saint Bob, the serene mystic, does no justice to his considerable gifts as a politician, and is a burden for a man only too conscious of his failings. Revered by some, he is despised by others, even some within the Green movement. There are many who hate Bob Brown, in part because they feel the distance between the public image of Saint Bob and the reality of Bob Brown—the country copper’s son willing to fight as hard and tough as his opponents for what he believes in—bespeaks a great hypocrisy.
Having myself brushed up against his more ruthless edges in the past, I put it to him that he is hard in getting what he wants.
‘Yes, I am,’ he says, without qualification or explanation.
We talk of Olegas Truchanas’ famous observation that Tasmania could be a shining beacon, and he reflects that yes, in the last election the refugee issue had no purchase in Tasmania, where sympathy for their plight was high, how not only did the Green vote go spectacularly up, but the Liberal vote went down; that the island, once mocked for its homophobes and rednecks, had become a bastion of reason and compassion in Australia. ‘I would like to see the world become Tasmania,’ he says.
More stories follow about so many people, and Bob Brown tells me how he has come to realise that humanity is everything, that if we can just find the way to look after ourselves, the environment will be fine.
‘People are the universe seeking to understand itself. It’s people who come first,’ he says, ‘that’s what I have learnt.’
Sitting out on a deck at his and Paul’s Hobart home—a pleasant, comfortable home not unlike its owners, seemingly unremarkable but built to look outwards—gazing at a splendid stand of white gums writhing over the Derwent beyond, I realise that we have run out of stories, and with reluctance I realise I must say something masquerading as a question, because this is, after all, an interview. So I suggest that I had always thought there was about him a melancholy that has in recent years lifted.
He reflects for a moment and then says that melancholy is the right description, and that he thought such was the natural state of an activist or indeed himself. Then he met Paul Thomas and discovered it was not so, that it was a consequence of having been alone for so long.
I ask him why he was so alone.
‘Because I was gay,’ he replies, and for a moment nothing more is said.
Then he speaks of how wonderful it is that young people now can simply be whatever they are, how happy he feels when he sees men holding hands in public, how it’s now rightly seen to be part of a spectrum of possibilities that one might be.
He speaks of how Bertrand Russell was a great influence on him, but how in the end Russell despaired of the cruelty of people. ‘But I like people,’ says Bob Brown, ‘I like life.’
Though he derives a deep joy from the natural world, it is people, he says, that must be the basis of the Green movement, not the environment. He fears unless people stand up and fight for themselves and the world in which they live, we will all perish, and that is to him, it is clear, an unacceptable loss of joy and wonder. He gestures with his hands towards the white gums, the birds, the river, and says he does not want in ten thousand years for us to lose this because we will be lost with it.
‘I have a will,’ he says finally, ‘for humanity to win.’
And it is then that I realise he has transformed once more.
It is as if having at last found love, he has discovered new, larger dimensions to his politics. I leave him in the late afternoon, conscious that he has promised to drive with Paul down to his small Huon farm to bury some dead lambs.
On the return trip he says they might stop off at the Kingston Hotel for a counter meal, and as I drive back down into Hobart I picture the two men from the country sitting in a suburban pub, one once a natty doctor, then the prophet-saint, now something far more remarkable—a man at peace, eating, drinking, laughing after his labour with his partner, in the midst of life, loving it and them each other.
I can hear them and see them, in another country that one man transformed and that then transformed him, even as I sit here writing this late of a night, and I think how a man might battle to save rivers, trees, refugees, other countries, only to discover that his whole journey was to save his own soul.
The Age
17 November 2001
TO DIVINE THE ORIGINS of the humiliation of a nation’s moral sense as evidenced in the recent behaviour of our prime minister in Washington, rivalling past scenes of minor satraps of Soviet satellites visiting Moscow for their latest riding orders, one could do worse than read a recent instructive article by Mark Mordue on the supposed death of Australian fiction.
Reading it, I realised that the cringe is back, and without knowing it, without wishing it, we were all once more becoming its captives. Though Australian novels are now published around the world, the best of Australian novelists celebrated as globally significant—something unimaginable twenty years ago—Australia now seems ever more some strange, newly founded colony of the mind.
Mordue’s piece echoed what I read and hear again and again about the failings of our writers and our publishers. Of the declining standards of editing, of the feebleness of our novelists. None of this accords with what is the truth, and yet this is becoming our understanding. All of it r
einforces a declining interest in our world, in our experience, our ways of understanding life. As a culture we seem imprisoned in some nightmarish vortex. From where comes this new shame, this shocking fear of ourselves as we are now? Where is our courage when we most need it?
In a breathless rush, Mordue walks into a bookshop and discovers ‘a stream of non-fiction work by Australian authors . . . that left our contemporary fiction scene six feet under’. Australian novels were ‘not up to the same standard, let alone able to match the furious energy our literary non-fiction exudes’. Literary fiction is ‘a plethora of second-raters and wannabes, postmodern failures and hype-riders’. ‘Even the big literary books felt bogged down in their own grandness, designed to impress more than relate. Australian fiction: what a sick old scene it seemed.’
I had not thought it possible that one writer could eliminate an entire literary tradition, but Mordue achieves just that, thrilling in his own announcement that fiction is dead. Then, adducing little more than his own enthusiasm as evidence, Mordue describes the great success of Australian non-fiction.
Mordue’s argument has the advantage of energy, adjectives and the only slightly more cogent reasoning of Drusilla Modjeska, whose essay on the purported failure of Australian fiction (published as ‘The Present in Fiction’ in her essay collection Timepieces of 2002) he gleefully grafts to his own feeling of inadequacy as a journalist who has written a book.
Why this inadequacy, I cannot say. After all, both Hemingway and Márquez were journalists who wrote books. His desire that journalists be granted literary respectability is understandable but misplaced. Their lack of respectability is why journalists sometimes write great books.
Mordue senses a hierarchy of letters, with novels at its apex and non-fiction written by journalists at its base. Here his instincts are at least sound: Australian letters are characterised by an appalling and destructive snobbery.