Saved By Those Who Gave A Damn

Andrew Darby - The Age

Bob Brown stands on the white quartz sandbank at the edge of the Gordon River's dark water. It is a place rich in rainforest and memories.. It was there that the first bulldozer assigned to help build the Gordon-below-Franklin dam lurched ashore from a barge under the protection of police, who kept blockaders at bay.

"There was an enormous sense of fear and dread," says Brown, who led the blockade against the dam 20 years ago this summer. "You had the feeling nothing was going to stop it (the dam)."

..Brown recalls the first time he saw the Franklin. It was 1976; he spent 13 magical days wild-river rafting. He came down again when he was a Tasmanian MP and some dam workers drew a line in the dirt and said: "Step over that and we'll beat your bloody brains out."

Upstream, where the southern hemisphere's largest rockfill dam was to be built 100 metres high, the same rainforested walls that have lined the Gordon for millennia are still there. But there is no dam.

A little further up is the confluence with the Franklin. Two more dams were meant to stifle this famous river, but they are not there either. And there is no dammed lake flooding back into a handful of other rivers. They are still wild, too.

This is the landscape of a victory some greens see as a modern-day Eureka Stockade; one that writer Amanda Lohrey recently called the moment in Australian political history when ecological politics entered the mainstream.

After 20 years, it has also entered school curriculums and popular culture. A feature film is being planned. It is surprising that one has not been made before. Blazing across our colour television screens, the blockade always looked like it would make a good movie. It was a giant stoush with a charismatic central figure and great scenery.

Despite the times of anger and dread that Brown remembers, it was also rollicking good fun. A couple of weeks ago the blockaders held an old comrades' reunion in Hobart. The air was filled with a nostalgic mix of '60s flower power and blockade steel that survives even in these years of greed and terror.

..The blockade was the climax of years of opposition to the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission's grand plans to use the wild rivers to generate electricity. But the blockade nearly did not happen.

Passionate philosophical debates about whether to hold it or not ran for months. Finally, it was organised at the offices of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society (TWS, or "Twiz"), behind a locked door on which was the mysterious sign: "Movement for a New Society".

Brown was the group's leader and public face, though dozens of others made the difference between success and failure.. By the time it ended, the river's direct supporters were counted in tens of thousands, including street marchers and election campaign volunteers.

The blockaders themselves were managed almost regimentally from headquarters at Strahan, on the west coast of the island, 65 kilometres downstream from the dam site. TWS transported them to Strahan, gave them a camp and food, placed them in "affinity groups" to be trained in non-violent action, and encouraged them to share their views at lengthy meetings.

This touchy-feely process was too much for some. But it reflected a strong feminist influence running through the blockade, and Brown stands by its value in filtering out people whose single actions, in an instant, might have cost the support of middle Australia.

..TWS records show 2613 people registered to take part as blockaders or helpers. Of these, 898 came from Tasmania, 641 from Victoria and 588 from NSW. Out of the total, 68 per cent were employed and 27 per cent were students. They included a paraplegic and a concrete technician.

..A total of 1272 people were arrested, most for trespassing on Hydro land at the river, or on roadworks. Not one arrest was for a crime involving violence.

..Fortune also smiled on the Franklin. The blockade ran into the 1983 federal election campaign, where it became perhaps as vital to Labor's victory in March as the asylum seeker crisis was to the Coalition in 2001. Then, the High Court approved Commonwealth powers to halt the dam by a vote of 4-3.

But it was the blockaders who transported suburban Australians from their living rooms each evening news, and carried them out to the wilderness, with its dark tannin rivers and rippling forests.

..And what of the two key Tasmanian politicians of the time, Bob Brown and premier Robin Gray? Brown is leading the Greens past the Democrats, election by election. They have two senators and one member in the House of Representatives. This year in Tasmania and Victoria their state votes rose again. Ahead lies the NSW poll.

On December 14 this year, exactly 20 years after the first blockaders were arrested, political commentator Alan Ramsey said that, impolitic though they may be, "increasing numbers of voters, sick to death of debauched major party behaviour, and slick, prostituted political values, look to the Greens as the conscience of political life".

Brown's old foe Robin Gray was a master of populist politics who rode the Franklin issue for years through the 1980s, and will forever be known as the man who dismissed the river as a leech-ridden ditch. These days he has a successful corporate life, including a directorship of Australia's largest woodchipper, Gunns Limited.

..What then, were the lessons to be learned from the blockade? "That you must never, never, never, give up on something you feel strongly about, and where a great wrong is being done," Brown says.

"That bulldozers aren't always the strongest form of power. The hearts of people are a mighty strong force, and it's infectious."