Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

a month. Perhaps the seminal moment in
the campaign was an early morning raid by
more than 50 police, costing over $60,000,
where VicRoads contractors cut down
a series of 90 year old trees as the first
stage of the actual roadworks. When this
happened at dawn on a Sunday morning,
local residents alerted CAFE activists, who
were able to get to the site in time to save
at least some of the trees. FoEM and other
activists joined in a series of arrestable
actions that obstructed road works.
Eventually all but one person arrested
during the campaign had their charges
dropped.
Transport issues have been a common
theme for FoEM activists with campaigns
often concentrating on opposing
unsustainable infrastructure such as
freeways. Various FoEM campaigners
supported locals by occupying trees in the
Mullum creek valley in Ringwood to stop
the Ringwood Bypass and campaigned
for the light rail link from Melbourne to
Doncaster, which had been promised by
the State Government when it originally
approved the Eastern freeway. In 1999,
Streets for People was established as
a new transport campaign at FoEM
focussing on proactive, positive and
creative action. In 1998, Streets for People
organised the third Reclaim the Streets
festival outside of the UK.
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Transport issues have also been
prominent in the work of FoES over the
years. The group campaigned against
most major freeway developments over
the last 20 years, such as the Eastern
Distributor Expressway. In 2000, FoES
worked with other local and state groups
to successfully advocate for the $1.4B
publicly funded Parramatta – Chatswood
rail link.
1996 was a busy year for FoEM, with
more than 50 direct actions organised by
the group. One of the more dramatic of
these was a blockade of the ‘extinction
express’ – a train carrying whole logs
from Bairnsdale in Gippsland to the
Midways woodchip mill near Geelong for
export to be used in paper production.
FoEM worked with community activists
from Geelong and the Otways to occupy
the Midways woodchip mill on many
occasions, raising awareness of the
fate of our native forests being logged
for woodchips. One of the less glorious
moments in 1996 was when activists
occupied a rice ship in the harbour at
Geelong after local scouts identified it as
being a woodchip ship – still it was a useful
training exercise, and activists then spent
much of the day halting production at the
chip pile at the adjacent Midways site.
FoE 30 Years 58