two illustrated women. One holding sign up with one hand and the other is holding a loudspeaker. They are dressed in colourful clothes.

Women’s Stories of Environmental Activism: Susan

Introduction

This story is part of a series created from interviews undertaken with five women who stayed at Camp Binbee for one week in late 2017 to take action against the Carmichael coal mine development. The interview project was organised by Robyn Gulliver, who hoped that recording these stories would both give a greater voice to the women who have played such a vital role in the Australian environmental movement since its inception, as well as demonstrate the immense sacrifices people often make in their efforts to stop ongoing environmental decline. 

Each interview was recorded and transcribed, and then lightly edited and compiled into a narrative tracking the key elements in their stories and the key moments that changed them (note names have been anonymised). The stories begin with a note from Robyn about the context in which the interview was conducted. 

Meeting Susan at Camp Binbee

We were sitting in a camp meeting. To the casual observer it looks like 30 people sitting in a circle having a discussion. To other trained eyes they might see a shimmering, seething pit of individual needs, egos, doubt, tension and blithe ignorance. With her doctorate, her high-level work experience, her ability to cut to the chase, and her portfolio of achievements, Susan has a keen sense of what’s really happening. She wants action. But because she is a goal-oriented person, enduring long meetings slowly working through consensus in the heady atmosphere of a frontline camp can be difficult to endure. There’s a lot of talking. A lot of back and forth. Many opinions to consider and expectations to meet. All while the construction of the mine just a few hundred kilometers away continues apace.

Bridging the gap between the fantasy of just getting out there and doing anything –anything!– to stop this mine, and the reality of long, hard months, years of movement building can result in tense and demoralising meetings. Bridging the gap between the long termers who know more about the local sensitivities and the community hostility with the demands of ‘action now!’ from newcomers to the camp is a continual process of mediation. Inevitable frustration accrues.

There are so many options, so many strongly held beliefs about what actions will offer the most effective pathways to stop the mine. If there is one person who can see the range of strategies on offer, match up a selection of tactical options and assess which are more feasible and which are more likely to be effective, it would be Susan. But, life in a frontline camp isn’t all about matching feasibility, efficiency, and effectiveness. It’s about being part of the group: and it is the group dynamics which ultimately dictate outcomes. What we would like to achieve together isn’t always the best or brightest or bravest thing. But at the very least it is always one more step along that pathway. Susan’s story about the bigger picture of being in a group, for better or worse, provides a fascinating insight into just how we try to solve not just our external problems but also the many internal challenges all social and environmental movements face.

Susan’s Story

Being a Nonconformist

I first moved to Australia a pretty long time ago. I was at University and at that time, Australia was extremely gendered. I remember these friends, these young women at University, who told me that I’d never get married, I’d never make a go of myself if I didn’t learn to conform to the way women are supposed to behave. And I was thinking, what are you talking about? You know, I was oblivious that I was actually breaking their rules. Maybe it’s because I had a really unusual upbringing…I’ve never met anybody like me! I went to 14 different schools. I lived across four continents. I didn’t need the same sense of belonging, because I’d never had it. That sounds really weird, but as a result I’m probably more independent in the way I went about doing things. I sat back and looked at what was around me, and I worked out how I fit into it. And if I saw any injustice, I worked out what I would do about it.

My dad used to write letters for Amnesty International, back in the days when they were a really grassroots organisation. My mum was a really good singer and she was one of the lead singers in the choir. They were always giving back; this was the way we were brought up. Doing a lot of community things was just normal. For a time about 25 years ago I used to run a Landcare group when my kids were quite small. But that was in the days when the funding was just starting to disappear. We were trying to keep it going, and we succeeded with this for quite a long time. We did some land rehabilitation projects in the community and loads of volunteers turned up for all that stuff; it was great. 

When I worked for the government or schools or whatever else, I was always worried a little bit about backlash with any career stuff. There have been times I’ve had itchy feet, thinking I should be going and doing these different sorts of actions with people. That I should go and join some things, but I didn’t do it. Probably because I had too much going on, that I couldn’t do that at the time.

Politics

Over time I started to get more involved in the Greens as a political group. I had never joined a political party before. I actually filled in an application to join the Labor party at one stage, and I sat on it. I realised it was because I wasn’t really comfortable with everything they were doing. Instead I met people from the Greens and realised that they are actually the same mould as me. I met a few quite active Greens through the projects and then I joined the Greens party.

Joining the Greens gave me an entree into another set of information and literature that I hadn’t seen before. Concurrently I’d done an environmental management degree, and I understood environmental law. Because I did environmental law subjects as part of that, when I sat down and read the party literature, about what they were about and where their mindset was…it was just, it was like, this was right.

The Greens have a platform of four bases to it, and it covered what I liked. It didn’t mean that I had to expect every other Greens member to have the same issues in their heart that I had. I fit somewhere in between the two extremes of focusing exclusively on environmentalism or social welfare. And the people in the local Greens groups that I was in fit in different places in between as well. They were really worried about protecting farming land and lifestyle, so they had motivations. You know, that’s what it comes down to. You know, you work on the things that you see as a problem, in the way that you’ve got the skills to work on it, as a problem.

A big issue at the time [in the early 2000s] was the war going on in Iran and Iraq, the Iraq War. I can remember a lot of the work we were doing at the time was organising marches and whatever to try and stop the war. I don’t think they were really effective in the long run. But we certainly did things like organise telephone banking to politicians to try calling them and going in and visiting members of Parliament to try and put agendas on, find out where they sat and went there so we could present ours. I was in the Greens in my local area, where only about 15 people run the show or ever turned up to anything at all. There’s a lot of members who don’t turn up to anything. However, all the active people were involved in different kinds of projects. Some people were involved in social welfare issues, some were involved with ecological issues.

I started doing more work and writing submissions in particular. No other members did submissions; most of them thought I was nuts. Many of them thought I was wasting my time writing submissions on issues because you can’t change politicians’ minds. However, I felt it was vitally important to actually put submissions in. In particular I wrote a number of different council submissions on development projects, which I thought were horrendous. And I went into the council one day and discovered that they knew my name. They knew who I was. They called the General Manager over to come and talk to me. Apparently, I’d saved them a huge amount of money, because they were going to approve developments which were going to get flooded or had clearance issues, and they had missed it. And their agents had missed it. And they started asking me to come in as a community representative for various issues but not pay me; instead to sit at the table with the people who were really highly paid! In general, they were really pleased that I understood the constraints they were in. These submissions really did make a difference as we actually got a couple of people in the Greens elected as members of the council. From that point, there was more of an understanding about what it was I’d done.

Strong women

There were a couple of other people in the Greens who were really, really active. There were synchronicities where we would bring a project along that we wanted to work on, and we would help someone else work on theirs. It didn’t have to be your project. And it’s interesting that they were nearly all women. They definitely were nearly all women. There was a difference between the approaches that men and women took. The women were a bit more confrontational. In a very polite way. In a polite way, you know, thinking of times when we went to see government ministers, when we had two men and two women going, and then the men would be getting annoyed and irritated, but the women would be going systematically through, in a very polite way but a very challenging way. In the earlier days men often thought they knew right and wrong. The men were more likely to take their bat and ball and go home, when they thought something wasn’t effective enough. They just don’t turn up again. Whereas, the women are willing to hear it out, to see what they could do with what they’ve got. You know, somebody comes up with a crazy idea, then there is nothing wrong with working out a context where they could use it. Which keeps them involved.

Now there are a lot of strong women around, and the men are happy with that or they would have gone. As a result, to me the gendered issue has become much less important or obvious as I’ve gotten older. And I’d say, [now I’m past 50], the groups that I’ve worked with are male and female who work together quite happily. And there is none of that rubbish here.

Tactical impact

Now I am free to do direct action at the moment, because I’m independent. I think direct action, as a tactic, is effective. I remember once when I wrote something on Facebook about the direct action tactics we were using and this woman came back and said, “I don’t know why you people are causing all this trouble”. She said she’s worked on all these issues all her life, she’s worked for legalised abortion, and she’s worked for this, and she’s worked for that and the other. Her view was that that’s the way we should be doing it. But my answer was really clear: we still don’t have legalised abortion; we still have all these issues. None of them have actually come to a conclusion. None of them have been resolved positively. So, there is a point where direct action really needs to complement the rest of the work that goes on. 

I find the symbolic actions a bit airy fairy. I’m happy if someone else does that but I can’t help them with that. The particularly challenging ones that come to mind for me are the number of people over the last year who have come to our groups and say they’ve written a song. And inside my heart goes…huh. We have enough songs. But on the flip side, when we went down to the Downer EDI, we were looking for 100 shareholders, we ended up with 150. That blew our minds, absolutely. We fronted up down there, and people wanted to go and sing songs. We had to convince them that if you are going to sing it’s got to be really simple. Which is what we ended up with: ‘Who knew Downer, you knew. Who knew Downer, you knew’. That, you know, that’s how much goes in the media. You do not need any more complexity.

Oh, some of them were very hard to convince. They’d say ‘I brought my guitar, I brought my ukulele’, and I’m thinking, what is the point? But there is nothing wrong with that, I am just saying that by itself, it’s not going to change anything. You’ve still got to have someone else writing the letters, you’ve still got to do a range of activities. I still go and petition pollies, I still go and talk to politicians. On most issues people use different tactics that they have available to them. But I really do argue that I don’t think direct action by itself works. I really get annoyed when there are activities like that being organised, where I don’t think the end result is sufficient for the amount of effort that goes into it. 

Consensus based decision making

The Greens are a consensus party. I’ve been in the Greens long enough to know what consensus decision-making is and is not. It never works, because the same thing always happens, and that’s what we experience around frontline planning: we have a meeting, we decide we’re going out to do an action, and then someone comes back and says, “Oh no you can’t do that.” This is a common occurrence in organisations; everybody says they’ve got consensus decision-making. 

Yet it always hits that same problem, that there are people who have more knowledge than others. Consensus decision-making assumes that everybody either has the information required, or that information is presented as part of the meeting model. But the decisions cannot come from the person who is sitting there, knowing they know the least information. And they know they don’t have all the information yet they are being asked, “Well, what do you want to do? What do you want to do?” And we are all sitting there thinking, well what did you do last, how did it happen, what were the results, you know, what are the constraints we’ve got? And who the hell is paying for the petrol?

The line in the sand

For me, the Adani project is the line in the sand. And I’ll tell you, over all these years, I’ve been working on projects where they were financially viable, but they were ecologically disastrous. And you know at the time, that it’s an uphill battle to try and stop that, if there is money to be made. This project fails on every count.

Explore Further