Bob Brown is walking, but nearly wasn’t.
In July, while on Turrakana/the Tasman Peninsula, south-east of Hobart, staying at a friend’s cabin with his partner, Paul Thomas, he rose from bed one morning, took a few steps to the lounge room and began gasping. He couldn’t suck in enough air and had to sit. And he noticed his left calf was sore.
Having trained as a doctor more than 50 years ago, the celebrated environmentalist and Australian Greens’ lodestar quickly diagnosed himself: he had a pulmonary embolism. A blood clot that formed in a vein in his leg had risen to an artery in his lungs and was stopping the blood flow. Possibly in more than one spot.
He wondered if that might be it.
“I was thinking it could be,” he says more than two months on. “And that it might not be. But I know it’s coming very shortly. I’m 80, but I’m very relaxed about it. I’ve had a good life and I see all these brilliant young people who think very much like I do coming along, so I will become increasingly redundant.”
Brown is recounting this as we stroll along a fire trail on kunanyi/Mount Wellington, which sits above Hobart like a sentinel. We’re headed for O’Gradys Falls, a small waterfall beneath the summit’s famous columned face, known as the organ pipes. It’s late September and the sun is out, but this is Tasmania and Brown is dressed for the sub-10C mountain climate: a wool checked jacket over a flannel shirt.
We walk at a slow, steady pace. Once we reach the falls, Brown clambers unassisted down the steep muddy slope to pose for photos amid the moss and ferns in front of the cascade. He has the gait of an older man, but there is no sign of his health crisis just weeks earlier.
The threat was real. Rather than rush to the doctor, Brown chose to stay at the cabin, where he could gaze out at secluded, spectacular Stewarts Bay, just around the corner from Port Arthur, and collect his thoughts. Thomas brought aspirin and a tight stocking. That was Thursday. It wasn’t until Monday that Brown sought a medical opinion in Hobart and was ordered to spend three days in hospital for a series of anticoagulation injections.
He wasn’t worried, he says, because he had considered this moment for a long time. “I’ve thought a lot about death during my lifetime. Most people don’t – not about what death means without there being some prop, like going to heaven, or nirvana, or whatever,” he says.
“It’s an alarming prospect, perpetual annihilation. But it’s not if you put it in terms of all these people coming up afterwards – all these people who think exactly the same way and want life just in exactly the same way. We’re a continuum.
“We’ve become an atomised society which doesn’t understand that, and we need to get back to seeing life as a flowing and innovative thing on the planet, not as something that is exclusively being created for our own existence. That’s nonsense. And, of course, the commercial world thrives on talking about your individual needs and how to avoid all the pitfalls of life, and they make a lot of money on that. And we all fall for it to a degree.”
Brown’s reflections on a life in activism, and what it means to fight for societal change, are collected in what he says will be his last significant book, Defiance. His prose is similar to his speaking style – sometimes freewheeling, occasionally laced with dry humour, but cohering around a message about what he has learned and believes is required now.
He has been writing steadily since retiring from politics in 2012, including producing a sci-fi novelette aimed at young adults, Thera, in 2023. Defiance is a return to the big themes of his life, and a sequel of sorts to his 2014 semi-memoir, Optimism. It touches on some of his most celebrated moments, including the campaign to save the Franklin River and Tasmania’s south-west wilderness, and his shift into first state and then federal politics.
It also touches on his main post-political work: the creation of the Bob Brown Foundation, which takes a more direct and confrontational approach than some conservation organisations, including blockading native forest logging and opposing Antarctic krill fishing and salmon farming.
But Defiance is just as focused on others’ stories. He says the goal is inspiration, not straightforward autobiography. “I brought out Optimism, which really just says that pessimism doesn’t help, optimism does – take your pick. Defiance is the next part of that,” Brown says as we wander beneath a rainforest canopy.
Why? “Because the inaction that is compliance, rather than defiance, is the end of the planet as we human beings know it. That’s rapidly approaching us now,” he says.
“Here we are, approaching eight-and-a-half billion human beings, the biggest herd of mammals ever on the face of the planet, wanting to consume more, to have growth. And growth in a finite system ultimately must [lead to] collapse.
“All the great wizards, economists, powerful leaders of the world say, ‘we won’t listen to that because it doesn’t fit in with our wish to convert the planet into just a perpetual money-making machine’. Well, I like being an environmentalist because it’s sensible. And I like defying the growth mentality because it’s irrational. It’s nice to be on the rational side of existence.”
Defiance was initially envisaged as the middle part of a trilogy, but plans for a third book – to be called Caring, or possibly Compassion – have been ditched, at least for now, in part because “people know what caring is”.
Brown is less confident they have their heads around defiance. As the Albanese government tries to get a contentious re-write of environment law through parliament, he is blunt about where he thinks Australians stand on protecting the environment in 2025.
In the book, he quotes Martin Luther King Jr’s observation that “shallow misunderstanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will” and “lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection”.
King was talking about the US civil rights movement, but Brown sees echoes in his own work.
“It applies to the great majority of Australians who want the environment protected, but don’t want environmental conflict. In other words, they want us to lie down and allow the bulldozers in [to destroy nature],” he says.
“People are being asked to sign petitions [for environmental causes] that don’t even get read out in parliament. Clicktivism is rampant when activism is required. We’ve got less than 2% of philanthropy going to the environment and less than 1% of government funding going to the environment. It’s incredible that so many people think that we should protect the environment, but we shouldn’t do anything actively to protect it.”
It’s a fairly stinging review of the collective behaviour of people Brown hopes to win over. It also reflects a divide within the environmental movement over how change can happen. At its simplified extremes, the split is between those who believe the path to a better world is through working with governments to improve laws and pocketing the wins that are possible and those who think the times demand condemnation of leaders and large-scale nonviolent protest. The Bob Brown Foundation is in the latter camp.
Speaking a few weeks later, after the federal environment minister, Murray Watt, has released the details of the government’s proposed overhaul of conservation law, Brown is sharply critical of Anthony Albanese.
He calls the prime minister an “environmental spoiler” who is “derelict in his obligation” to protect nature, argues the government has written laws to “appease the Coalition and big business” and says it is “absurd” for Watt to suggest the Greens should pass the legislation, reasoning it does not properly address the climate crisis or loopholes that allow agricultural land-clearing or native forest logging.
Yet he still sees reason for optimism. He cites the “3.5% rule”, which says that engaging that proportion of a population in a mass movement nearly always leads to success. “If we had 300 million people out on the streets globally, that would change the way politics disregards the environment overnight,” he says. “I keep coming back to the suffragettes: 99% of women didn’t take part, but 1% changed the world because their time had come. For us, it’s past time to defend this life-giving planet before we destroy it.”
He eyes a longstanding roadblock in News Corp media outlets “pouring absolute scorn on environmentalists and implying that we’re a threat to society, when in fact we’re the salvation for society” and concludes “it’s time we got over being nice in return”.
As we return towards where we started our walk on Pinnacle Road, Brown gestures towards the Tasmanian parliament on the waterfront below us, where he entered politics in 1983, and raises the state election held in July.
Voters in Australia’s smallest state entrenched five Greens MPs and several progressive independents with increased support, while the environmentally focused Peter George, who was backed by Climate 200 funding, received the highest vote in the multi-member electorate of Franklin.
Tasmania’s Hare-Clark system differs from those used federally and in other states, but Brown says the result is a “little beam of sunrise”.
“The crossbench of independents and Greens in Tasmania is now bigger than the [Labor] opposition. That’s not going to reverse,” he says, describing George as “the only person on the planet ever to be elected from a platform of opposing polluting fish farms”.
“It’s a bit like when I was elected as a consequence of the Franklin campaign, all those years ago,” he says. “That phenomenon is coming back. But it’s going to be much bigger.”
• Defiance by Bob Brown is out now through Black Inc Books
