Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

In the mid ‘70s I was studying
environmental science and conservation
at Canberra College of Advanced
Education (later Canberra Uni). A group
of us students decided we wanted to give
voice to our alarm about the issues we
were studying and the growing concern
we had about the destruction happening
around Canberra, including the clearfelling
of the South East forests around
Eden for woodchips and the rapid
choking of Canberra’s air by the car.
We visited Moss Cass, the Whitlam
government’s Environment Minister,
Australia’s first, and his staffer Peter
Ellyard suggested that we form a
FoE group because of FoE’s growing
reputation of combining militant activism
for social justice with rigorous and
credible research.
We formed a campus FoE group, and
then found another already based out of
ANU and so joined FoE Canberra.
The Radical Ecology conference, in
Melbourne in 1975 was a key event
that brought together environmentalists,
unionists, scientists, socialists, anarchists,
urban activists, hippie ratbags, students,
to analyse and celebrate the global
ecology movement, including the
pioneering struggles of Australia’s
builders labourers’ Green Bans.
The big eye-opener for me at the
Conference was the emerging global
struggle against the nuclear power, and
Australia’s connection through proposals
to develop uranium mines in the Kakadu
region of the NT.
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The conference concluded with Australia’s
first street march against uranium mining, and
we novices from Canberra were so fired up
we leafleted all the passengers on the Inter-
Capital Daylight train taking us back home,
with what was possibly Australia’s first mass
leafleting on the uranium threat.
The Radical Ecology Conference was where
we connected with Peter Hayes, Neil Barrett
and others who coordinated the Melbourne
and National office of FoE Australia out of a
tiny house in MacArthur Place, Carlton.
The FoE Australia network was getting
established, with groups forming in Sydney,
Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth as well as
Melbourne and Canberra. Even Darwin had
a FoE group, with an outpost camp at the
proposed Ranger mine-site occupied by a
man known as Strider, who’d send regular
despatches.
The FoE Melbourne office moved around
the corner to a terrace on Nicholson St,
Carlton and the legendary FoE food coop was
established and Chain Reaction published.
The Bike Ride Against Uranium to Canberra
was a major action in FoE’s early days,
challenging the Whitlam Government’s
flirtation with a uranium bonanza driven
by the Minister for Energy, Rex Connor.
Hundreds of riders rode up and down the
Hume Highway from Melbourne and Sydney,
holding meetings in small towns along the
way, and eventually converging on Parliament
House in mass demonstrations, and possibly
Australia’s first ‘mass mutation’, in which
hundreds of us lurched across the frosty lawns
of old Parliament House up the very steps of
the venerable House.
FoE 30 Years 13