Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

FoE led the anti-uranium campaign nationally
in its earliest days, and played a crucial part in
bringing together a national coalition against
uranium mining, which managed to hold the
line on three mines for nearly 30 years. The
uranium issue consumed much of the energy
of our activists, but we still had time for
campaigning against logging, freeways and
whaling, and other issues.
I became the National Liason Officer (NLO)
after finishing my studies, and built from the
ground-breaking work of David Allworth,
who kept the best files and had the most
persuasive phone-manner imaginable.
I moved from Canberra and based myself
out of the FoE Sydney office, a three storey
terrace in Crown St, Surrey Hills, leased
by Robert Tickner, then an Aboriginal legal
aid lawyer and soon to be Deputy Mayor
of Sydney and later Minister for Aboriginal
Affairs in the Hawke/Keating government .
My work as FoE NLO was greatly assisted
by Tom Uren, then Deputy Leader of the
Opposition and before that the inspirational
Minister for Urban and Regional
Development in the Whitlam government and
prominent anti-nuclear and urban protection
activist.
In the midst of the serious stuff, there was
fun and music.
During the protests at the International
Whaling Commission in Canberra in 1977 a
10-metre blow-up whale was floated on Lake
Burley Griffin in Canberra only to be carried
by wind across the Lake to land smack-bang
in the middle of a freeway we were also
campaigning to stop. The next morning
the whale was inflated in the hotel hallway
outside the rooms of the Japanese delegation
(who were leading the charge to increase
killing quotas) only to be brutally hacked
to ribbons by hotel staff. By the afternoon
hundreds joined a funeral procession through
Canberras’ Civic centre accompanied by a
lamenting brass band.
FoE activists were also engaged in bitter
struggle to drag the Australian conservation
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Foundation (ACF) from a conservative,
nature conservation-focused organisation to
one that focused on a broader set of issues,
and linked ecology with union, women,
indigenous and gay struggles, and challenged
the economic and political structures driving
unsustainable lifestyle.
Many FoE Sydney activists were squatting
in Darlinghurst, in soon-to-be demolished
houses in the pathways of soon-to-be-built
inner city freeways. Others were camped at
the gates of the Lucas Height reactor. The
nuclear campaign in Sydney reached its high
point with the series of blockades of the
wharves at White Bay, protesting shipments
of yellowcake from Lucas Heights being
secretly spirited out in massively guarded
convoys of trucks speeding through Sydney’s
suburbs in the dead of night, only to be
exposed by an elaborate network of activists
alerted by the Lucas Heights campers, and
mobilised through elaborate ‘phone trees’
that could get hundreds of protesters to the
wharves within an hour.
In Darwin the wharfies had refused to load the
first shipments of yellowcake from Ranger,
and the Railways Union, after banning
shipments from the Mary Kathleen mine in
Queensland, led the campaign within the
ACTU to stop new mines.
FoE Brisbane ran a food coop and urban ecoliving
centre in West End, and was organising
bikeway and public transport campaigns and
was heavily involved in the campaign for the
Right to March and the Right to Organise and
Protest. These were to uphold the democratic
rights to protest uranium mining, abuse of
Aboriginal, women and gay rights, union
busting and other basic rights being stifled by
the Bjelke Petersen government’s campaign
of mass arrests and fines of dissidents.
Yes, FoE in the ‘70s was an exciting mix
of ecology, solidarity and sexual politics. It
marked the ‘punk era’. The spirit of radical
grassroots education, organising and activism.
What marked FoE’s early days still lives on.
FoE 30 Years 14