“I grew up in Brisbane and came into my teens under the Bjelke Petersen regime. I came out of high school and started looking around at the society I was in and basically came to the conclusion it was like the last days of the Roman empire. I could see the Vietnam war, Apartheid in South Africa, the threat of nuclear war…my Dad was in the Civil Defence and he would bring home pamphlets that had the concentric rings that showed you the damage circles from a 50 megaton nuclear explosion where everything is vaporised within the first kilometre, etc. That was kind of part of my world.
Sometime in my teens I also became aware of the threat of ecological collapse. There was this emerging awareness of not only could we perish in a nuclear holocaust but that Eco catastrophe could potentially end the human race as well. I grew up with a sense of some foreboding about the way the world was going. I spent a fair chunk of my teens trying to understand decadence. I basically ended up being pretty bloody decadent. There was a little society that revolved around the Royal Exchange Hotel in Brisbane which was where the radicals from the uni hung out. I spent an enormous amount of time drinking beer in the beer garden and getting up to all sorts of mischief there. I was probably heading into a down hill spiral but fortunately In 1973 a bloke from the university turned up and said they were looking for people to set up for a festival at a place called Nimbin in Northern NSW. They were particularly after heavy drinkers to fraternise with the locals and particularly the Tug of War team. These were all the blokes who worked in the timber industry who at the time were the world champion tug of war team.
I moved to Nimbin permanently on my 20th birthday and took the job of drinking with the tug of war team pretty seriously. I also fell in love with living in the country. The first realisation I had was just how useless I was, having been groomed for some kind of academic or scientific career. I was a bright, if rebellious student but had no practical skills whatever. Based on this extremely valuable realisation that I was useless, I started accumulating skills and began looking at the various cycles that make life possible. I started getting into gardening in a holistic way where you are looking at a cycle about composting, gardening, harvesting and preparing food. I also got involved in the wood cycle.
Initially I became interested in building a Dulcimer which is a 4 string musical instrument from the Appalachian Mountains in America. My friend was making them. To make a Dulcimer I needed to accumulate woodworking tools. One of the tools was given to me by the old bloke who had owned the Tuntable Falls Saw Mill. He had this monstrous, gear driven, antique chainsaw and he gave it to me. The bull dozer driver who cleared our building site at Lillian Rock when I started homesteading with Jyllie Jackson saw the chain saw and I was offered a logging job. I was building a timber house at the time and buying a lot of timber from the Nimbin Saw mill, it seemed getting involved with that side was fair enough so I took the job. I was still working down that track of fraternising with the loggers on the tug of war team. I’ve always had this thing where if there is a fight or struggle it’s usually won or lost in the middle ground so I’ve always been a middle ground person in contentious issues.
Jyllie and I met in front of the tomato sauce building just after the festival. She had come up from Sydney for the weekend and after we met she didn’t go back to Sydney. If was one of those instant falling in love things. We ended up having 3 beautiful kids together over the next decade. Before I started the logging job I asked Jyllie to dye a pair of white overalls I had red. The dye didn’t work very well so I turned up on my first day in my logging job with pink overalls, a bell necklace and a long ponytail. The logging truck driver nearly had a heart attack. I stayed in that job for about 5 months and then decided I wanted to work on the other side of the timber industry..reforestation. I started a business called Tweed Woodlot Services and we planted about 85,000 trees over the next 5 years for landowners all over the North coast. It balanced out the logging thing. During that time I became passionate about green employment, particularly reforestation and conservation work because again, I saw it as a middle ground area. The dialogue around the environment at the time was all about either jobs or the environment and I was jumping up and down saying Hey! There’s more employment in fixing the environment than there is destroying it. I spent a lot of time as an unpaid lobbyist promoting environmental repair and green employment more broadly.
A few times I went to Canberra and planted trees on the Parliament House lawn. The first time was in 1986 just below the steps of old Parliament House. I planted more the day after the new Parliament House opened with some Aboriginal friends. The 3rd time was on the 31st December, the last day of the Bicentenary in 1988. I had 5 seedlings and a shovel and media turned up and it went to air on networks around Australia. The security guard walked up and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m planting trees.’ ‘Why? he said. I said I want to draw attention to the fact that in our Bicentenary year we spent twice as much landscaping the new parliament house than we spent landscaping the rest of Australia. It was literally true, 16 million dollars to landscape Parliament House and 8 million for other land and tree projects. He said, Do you have permission to do it? I said, No! He said, Ah well, probably be ok and walked off. As non-violent direct action it was beautiful. It would be different now. That went to air and for a while after they had people randomly rocking up to Parliament House dropping off seedlings. A year later the decade of Landcare was announced.
Sometime in my teens I also became aware of the threat of ecological collapse. There was this emerging awareness of not only could we perish in a nuclear holocaust but that Eco catastrophe could potentially end the human race as well. I grew up with a sense of some foreboding about the way the world was going. I spent a fair chunk of my teens trying to understand decadence. I basically ended up being pretty bloody decadent. There was a little society that revolved around the Royal Exchange Hotel in Brisbane which was where the radicals from the uni hung out. I spent an enormous amount of time drinking beer in the beer garden and getting up to all sorts of mischief there. I was probably heading into a down hill spiral but fortunately In 1973 a bloke from the university turned up and said they were looking for people to set up for a festival at a place called Nimbin in Northern NSW. They were particularly after heavy drinkers to fraternise with the locals and particularly the Tug of War team. These were all the blokes who worked in the timber industry who at the time were the world champion tug of war team.
I moved to Nimbin permanently on my 20th birthday and took the job of drinking with the tug of war team pretty seriously. I also fell in love with living in the country. The first realisation I had was just how useless I was, having been groomed for some kind of academic or scientific career. I was a bright, if rebellious student but had no practical skills whatever. Based on this extremely valuable realisation that I was useless, I started accumulating skills and began looking at the various cycles that make life possible. I started getting into gardening in a holistic way where you are looking at a cycle about composting, gardening, harvesting and preparing food. I also got involved in the wood cycle.
Initially I became interested in building a Dulcimer which is a 4 string musical instrument from the Appalachian Mountains in America. My friend was making them. To make a Dulcimer I needed to accumulate woodworking tools. One of the tools was given to me by the old bloke who had owned the Tuntable Falls Saw Mill. He had this monstrous, gear driven, antique chainsaw and he gave it to me. The bull dozer driver who cleared our building site at Lillian Rock when I started homesteading with Jyllie Jackson saw the chain saw and I was offered a logging job. I was building a timber house at the time and buying a lot of timber from the Nimbin Saw mill, it seemed getting involved with that side was fair enough so I took the job. I was still working down that track of fraternising with the loggers on the tug of war team. I’ve always had this thing where if there is a fight or struggle it’s usually won or lost in the middle ground so I’ve always been a middle ground person in contentious issues.
Jyllie and I met in front of the tomato sauce building just after the festival. She had come up from Sydney for the weekend and after we met she didn’t go back to Sydney. If was one of those instant falling in love things. We ended up having 3 beautiful kids together over the next decade. Before I started the logging job I asked Jyllie to dye a pair of white overalls I had red. The dye didn’t work very well so I turned up on my first day in my logging job with pink overalls, a bell necklace and a long ponytail. The logging truck driver nearly had a heart attack. I stayed in that job for about 5 months and then decided I wanted to work on the other side of the timber industry..reforestation. I started a business called Tweed Woodlot Services and we planted about 85,000 trees over the next 5 years for landowners all over the North coast. It balanced out the logging thing. During that time I became passionate about green employment, particularly reforestation and conservation work because again, I saw it as a middle ground area. The dialogue around the environment at the time was all about either jobs or the environment and I was jumping up and down saying Hey! There’s more employment in fixing the environment than there is destroying it. I spent a lot of time as an unpaid lobbyist promoting environmental repair and green employment more broadly.
A few times I went to Canberra and planted trees on the Parliament House lawn. The first time was in 1986 just below the steps of old Parliament House. I planted more the day after the new Parliament House opened with some Aboriginal friends. The 3rd time was on the 31st December, the last day of the Bicentenary in 1988. I had 5 seedlings and a shovel and media turned up and it went to air on networks around Australia. The security guard walked up and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m planting trees.’ ‘Why? he said. I said I want to draw attention to the fact that in our Bicentenary year we spent twice as much landscaping the new parliament house than we spent landscaping the rest of Australia. It was literally true, 16 million dollars to landscape Parliament House and 8 million for other land and tree projects. He said, Do you have permission to do it? I said, No! He said, Ah well, probably be ok and walked off. As non-violent direct action it was beautiful. It would be different now. That went to air and for a while after they had people randomly rocking up to Parliament House dropping off seedlings. A year later the decade of Landcare was announced.