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https://theconversation.com/valerie-brown-met-the-queen-was-arrested-and-led-greenpeace-australia-284371>
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Review: The Girl on the Roof: the life of a change-maker – Valerie A. Brown
(Scribe)
As a child watching people from the roof of her Brisbane home, Valerie A.
Brown, now in her nineties, noticed how “their actions did not match their
stated ideals.” She dedicated her life to changing this, becoming one of
Australia’s foremost change-makers.
In an era when most women could only dream of careers, she had numerous highly
successful ones, changing Australia’s social and intellectual landscape quietly
but profoundly.
The list of her roles is long (and exhausting!): TAFE teacher, consumer
advocate, activist, public service department head, professor of environmental
health, carer and writer. And a wife and mother. “I found I had acquired the
skills needed … to keep multiple balls in the air,” she writes.
She started a children’s theatre group, promoted birth control against social
conventions, worked to improve health systems in Nepal, and, despite feeling
unqualified, headed Greenpeace Australia during the bombing of its
Rainbow
Warrior yacht in 1985 and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
“My experiences with Greenpeace read like a spy novel,” she writes. As an
initiation, she was taken into “a wild sea” off Sydney in a “rubber duck”
speedboat. Days later, activists planned to block outlet pipes from spewing
chemical waste into Sydney Harbour, but “the waste backing up into the factory
could have caused serious damage and even a threat to life”. Her negotiations
with the chemical company and the activists averted tragedy, but “left me being
perceived by the Greenpeace activists as a wimp”.
Worse came soon after, at New Zealand’s Port of Auckland, when French army
divers blew up the
Rainbow Warrior with bombs fixed to its keel. They wanted
to stop it leading a protest flotilla against the French testing of nuclear
weapons in the Pacific. They killed a photographer, Fernando Pereira. “If the
crew had not unexpectantly gone ashore for coffee,” writes Brown, “12 of them
would have died.”
Brown also ran a national drugs summit and was an early advocate for AIDS
prevention. She was in numerous activist, cultural and social groups, and was
patron of an anti-war and environmentalist choir.
She joins a long line of women who are under-recognised, despite their work
changing lives and systems. Her book tells a fascinating story that will
inspire those who want to build a better world."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
