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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781741154498 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 10/28/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Bob Brown
Gentle Revolutionary
By James Norman
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2004 James NormanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74115-449-8
CHAPTER 1
The 'wellspring'
At a screening of forest films in Hobart in February 2003, around 50 people gathered to watch the documentary works by a local environmental film-maker. The films were screened in a large second-storey room above Paul Thomas's Rugs of Tibet shop down a small laneway off Harrington Street, central Hobart. Paul Thomas is Bob Brown's partner of eight years.
Understandably, after a week in Canberra in which he was called upon to answer for an anti-war movement, Bob didn't make an appearance at the screening until late in the evening. He made a short speech to the small crowd assembled there as one might speak with a group of close friends. And although the strains were showing after the week in Canberra, he offered some simple advice to those in attendance. 'Listen, if you feel just about ready to give up all hope, do what I do and spend a night out in the forest under the stars — it'll probably do the trick.' And therein lay the simplicity and steadfastness of Bob Brown — in one neat sound bite.
Over the past two decades, Bob Brown has been the stalwart who has carried the Greens banner all the way into the mainstream public spotlight; into the formidable position it now fills as the identifiably and unambiguously left-wing opposition party in Australian politics. This gently-spoken, bespectacled gay doctor from Tasmania has become something of a national hero of almost pop star status — respected even by those who diametrically oppose his politics.
It was frequently remarked throughout the 2000 federal election that two men stood out from the throng of federal politicians as noteworthy and successful in gaining the attention and respect of significant numbers of voters. They were John Howard and Bob Brown. By 2004, a revitalised ALP under Mark Latham had again reshaped the Australian political landscape. One of the first pledges Latham made on becoming ALP leader was to visit the Tasmanian forests with Bob Brown.
Howard is the long-surviving conservative Prime Minister, imbued with all the power and strength of a remarkable political strategist and survivor. Bob Brown's personal charisma is of an altogether different order. To his admirers he is seen as representing almost the antithesis of the brooding aggression or competitiveness that lies behind much of the 'political speak' commonly associated with politicians.
Brown is certainly not politically conservative, although in many respects he is very conventional. His conservatism is on the surface — conservatively dressed and mild-mannered, always clean-shaven, never publicly cussing. Yet the politics Bob Brown brings to the table are the politics of democratic revolution; the politics of sustainability over capitalism, of compassion over profit. His are the politics of optimism. Despite his mild-mannered veneer, Bob Brown will be remembered as one of Australia's true revolutionaries.
He frequently employs gentle humour, yet he is unwavering in his willingness to criticise those who only 'associate with the top end of town', as he frequently puts it. He is articulate in framing policy directions in the context of current, often local, voter interests, and consistently ties current issues back to his core concerns — Tasmanian forests and broader environmental issues.
His outspoken involvement in issues relating to the environment (and beyond) has led to his being recognised with a number of awards throughout his political life. These include being named Australian of the Year in 1983 by the Australian newspaper (and Australian of the Decade in 1990), winning the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 1990, BBC Wildlife Magazine's World's Most Inspiring Politician award in 1996, and being voted an 'Australian National Treasure' by the National Trust in 1998.
In 2002 Brown made the top ten list of 'Australia's Most Intriguing Gays' in DNA Magazine, and he was voted Australia's Most Culturally Influential Person by the Australian Financial Review Magazine in 2003. This grab bag of accolades indicates one thing — Bob Brown is both extremely popular and widely respected across a broad social spectrum.
There is more to Bob Brown's internationalism than merely holding a global perspective. He carries a global ambition for the Greens, as a force for a new kind of 'positive globalisation' in this century, a force with the potential to be every bit as significant as the labour movement was in the last.
But to his opponents, Bob Brown is a zealot, an extremist, and a serious threat. As the Greens have gathered increasing momentum as a political force, the more venomous the attacks on the party and its leader have become.
He has been bashed, threatened, and publicly vilified on numerous occasions. In November 2003 Queensland Liberal Senator George Brandis compared the ideology of the Australian Greens to the Nazis of 1920s and 1930s Europe, quoting verbatim from conservative Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt.
In response to such accusations of political manipulation and zealotry, Brown is unfazed. 'I'm not, [any of those things] I'm a Presbyterian,' he told the Australian in 2000. He was referring to his conservative Presbyterian upbringing in rural New South Wales.
Bob Brown brings sincerity and dignity to political positions and a world view that many Australians would consider radical. He anticipates and disarms those who would wish to use the weapons of scandal or innuendo against him by, for example, announcing his homosexuality in his maiden speeches to both the Tasmanian and federal parliaments.
Brown's persona invites audiences, and the Australian public in general, to reconsider their own preconceptions about what is in fact radical. He creates the possibility of a different perspective; the formerly unthinkable can come to be seen as reasonable and rational. The shy, conventional side of Bob Brown makes it all the more surprising that he has emerged as such an outspoken activist.
Brown's own increasingly important role on the stage of Australian national politics has been associated with the rise of the Greens as a formidable force in Australian political life.
Perhaps the defining moment of this emergence of the Greens as an opposition party of substance in contemporary Australian politics occurred during the Tampa incident in 2001. At that time many ordinary Australians felt utterly appalled that the Howard Government had used images of boat people attempting to enter the country and made the claim that these refugees had deliberately thrown their children overboard in order to garner sympathy from the Australian public.
After some media-driven inquiry, it was widely accepted that the government had in fact overstated the children overboard claims for political leverage. The Coalition lost Peter Reith over the incident, but the Greens picked up new surges of voter support nationally.
It was this incident more than any other that gained the Greens the reputation of being the only party in Australian politics at that time willing to make unambiguous statements of condemnation of the Howard Government. The Greens echoed a national mood of appalled horror that the government would go to such lengths in its attempts to shore up support for its own controversial refugee policies.
Following this, Bob Brown was frequently called upon by the Australian media as the voice of credible dissent to the Howard Government, or 'the de facto Leader of the Opposition', as he has frequently been branded. This extended to a whole range of issues way beyond environmental politics — from detention centres, to foreign affairs matters, to the 'war on terror' and more broad-based opposition to the Howard Government's perceived lean to the right.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the 'war on terror' doctrine formulated by the US and embraced by the Howard Government means that new threats to world peace loom large. It is an era of unprecedented media-fuelled fear of global terror. The September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon ushered in a global climate of insecurity and threat, with massive knock-on effects. The doctrine of the 'preemptive strike' was the new and pernicious foreign policy coming out of the US during the Iraq War, effectively alienating and alarming the UN and much of Europe.
It is a period that has brought unprecedented turmoil, fear and anxiety globally. As far as national anti-war opposition is concerned, Bob Brown has been in the hot seat. In mid-February 2003 Brown addressed rallies right around Australia on Australia's involvement in the Iraq War. He always drew the loudest applause as he took his place on the podium, leading some commentators to observe, 'Bob Brown never meets a bad microphone'.
He spoke of this war not being Australia's war at all — but being the war of John Howard, Tony Blair and George Bush. He spoke of the need to allow the UN weapons inspectors to carry out their work in the Gulf. He spoke of the common humanity and people power of those marching 'for a better way'.
The Prime Minister has never, ever been given a mandate by the people of Australia to go to war with Iraq. He has no authority to turn his back on the wishes of the people of Australia. This Prime Minister has abused the terms of freedom and democracy in his own country. We are the human spirit around the world saying no to the impending holocaust. We want there to be a just community with the autonomy subjugated to it, not an unjust global economy with the people subjugated to it. So we say to Bush, and to Blair and to Howard — look at the European alternatives to war. Otherwise you will have the unnecessary blood of children in Baghdad on your hands, and the destruction of hope around the planet. No, of course we do not see you as a terrorist — but what do the mothers of Baghdad think? Have you asked them? Or have you not, like Saddam Hussein, have you not the heart to feel the terror of those mothers? I'd like to turn the Prime Minister's mind from the Bush White House, to the feeling of the people on the streets, where it is due.
In his distinctive way, Brown's words touched a nation, managed to cut through the cynicism many Australians feel toward politicians in general, and gave local voice and heart to a massive global movement that would come to be identified as the largest collective anti-war movement in history. The rallies he addressed in Melbourne and Sydney combined drew close to half a million people. Again, Brown was the revered spokesperson of the people on the streets.
Locally, both the ALP and the Howard Coalition Government have come to be seen as symptomatic of the drift toward centre right government politics taking hold globally, with a few notable exceptions such as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic/Green coalition in Germany and Silvio Berlusconi's vision for a far right neo-liberal Italy.
Bob Brown symbolises for many the links between social justice, environmentalism in practice, and the glaringly urgent need for a vision of a better world. He is an almost isolated example of an activist who has made the monumental transition from local campaigner, to effective and visible national and even global environmental freedom fighter.
Certainly the Bob Brown we see — beamed into our lounge rooms as the environmental defender, lone voice in parliament speaking out for the rights of refugees or against Australian involvement in war — is only one side of the man.
It tells us nothing, for example, of the home-loving Bob Brown who enjoys thumping out a tune on his piano and speaks of having been 'set free out of a prison' on finding a loving relationship with his partner Paul Thomas. Or of the Bob Brown who prefers steak and three veg for dinner over tofu, any day.
Nor does it bring us closer to an understanding of this man who struggled with demons inside himself for half a lifetime, who considered taking his own life as a shy confused young doctor in Canberra, and who didn't enter a committed loving relationship until the age of 52. The same man who made the remarkable, quixotic transformation to where we find him today — in his political prime.
Indeed, the personal revolutions that have taken place inside Bob Brown have left him well-armed to foster more broad based, social revolutions in his public political life.
The one-dimensional media-constructed image of Bob Brown fails to discover the source from which he draws his inspiration and staying power to endure almost twenty years of parliamentary sessions and endless demands on his time from all manner of local and international organisations. That wellspring, one suspects, is to be found in those places in nature — from the Franklin River to the rocky razorback forest bluffs around his bush block in the Liffey Valley in central northern Tasmania — those sacred wild places to which Bob Brown has always been drawn, and to which he has dedicated much of his adult life to protecting.
There amid the rushing water and the awe-inspiring stillness of the natural world, a million miles from the sterile tedium of the nation's legislature, we come closer to understanding what truly drives Bob Brown.
CHAPTER 2Green stirrings
As bushfires raged around the central west New South Wales town of Oberon two days after Christmas on 27 December 1944, Marjorie Brown gave birth to twins. First came Janice (Jan) then, half an hour later, Robert James Brown was born.
Jack Brown had moved his family — Marjorie and baby Ben — to Oberon just a year prior to the twins being born. Jack had previously worked for several years at Newtown Police Station in central Sydney. He would later tell stories to Bob about how members of the public too scared to make the journey home to the suburbs of Sydney had turned up in droves at the Newtown Police Station in 1942, when the city was shelled by the Japanese. Jack and Marjorie left Sydney in 1943, a time when Australia was deeply embroiled in war on two fronts, attracted by the relative calm and ordered life that awaited them on the New South Wales central tablelands.
The township of Oberon was a fairly typical small rural centre, complete with grand Victorian buildings dating back 9 to the end of the nineteenth century, and a Roman Catholic convent, run by the Sisters of St Joseph, which is still in operation today.
Jack Brown, the junior of two local policemen and proud father, missed the twins' moments of birth as he was helping battle the fires, but fortunately their delivery was complication-free. Jack later complained at how 'bloody silly' he had been to be off fighting fires when he should have been back at the hospital, but such were the jack-of-all-trades demands placed on a man in his position. Jack later frequently joked that Bob proved early that he was to be 'always the gentleman', coming out half an hour after Janice.
On the day the twins were born, all over the state of New South Wales temperatures soared into the high thirties, as bushfires raged. In Sydney alone, the Fire Brigade reported receiving 74 calls to fires on 27 December, as blazes burnt out of control in North Ryde and Epping.
Yet despite the severity of the state's fires, all domestic news was pushed off the front page by reports of Allied assaults on Germany. 'Our planes made at least 4000 flights over the battle area and destroyed large quantities of enemy tanks and transport,' reported the Sydney Morning Herald on the day Bob Brown was born.
Bob Brown was born into austere rural lifestyle, fairly typical at that time. World War II was well under way in the Pacific and many Australian families were looking longingly to a time beyond the war, when they could steer their offspring toward the kind of life they themselves had known — social order with religious underpinnings and a unique kind of Australian conservatism with elements of a 'larrikin' spirit behind it. Many families had grown up with war as a part of life; memories of the Great War still figured largely in the psyche of Bob's parents' generation.
Jack Brown (himself the son of a policeman) was every bit the 'lovable larrikin'. He told Bob that on his way to the hospital after fighting the fires he was further delayed, getting caught up chasing a rabbit for a block toward the hospital.
When he was two years old Bob Brown's family moved from Oberon to Trunkey Creek, a small agricultural town on the old coaching highway between Bathurst and Goulburn, where his father received a new posting as the local policeman. It is from here that Bob's earliest childhood memories come into view.
Bob's persistent mental image from Trunkey Creek is of the bush that surrounded the small town. Much of it was etched in hues of ghostly grey and black from bushfires that had hit the area throughout the previous decade. But even as Bob and Janice were very young children, the burnt-out bushland was slowly rejuvenating itself with bursts of green — the new foliage of budding eucalyptus trees.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bob Brown by James Norman. Copyright © 2004 James Norman. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
1 'The wellspring',2 Green stirrings,
3 A troubled kid,
4 London to Liffey,
5 The shock of Pedder,
6 Franklin daze,
7 Thick of the torrent,
8 Beyond the Franklin,
9 Of their own accord,
10 Green and gay,
11 Taking it to the nation,
12 International Green perspectives,
13 Into the Senate,
Acknowledgments and notes on sources,
Thank you,