Crusade: at home with Bob Brown and his partner, plus his latest environmental fight
At 72, Greens founder Bob Brown may be retired, but there’s no sign of the environmental warrior giving up the battle to save the planet. And right beside him is his partner, Paul Thomas. Samantha Trenoweth meets the devoted activists.
Agentle, drizzling rain drifts across green-grey hills and collects in tiny pearls on Bob Brown’s hand-knitted jumper. The retired Senator and former Australian Greens leader has quite the fan-base among women of a certain age who provide him with a treasure-trove of homespun knitwear. While Bob feeds the chooks, his partner of 21 years, Paul Thomas, dashes off to put a roast in the oven. A neighbour has whipped up a lemon and poppyseed cake for afternoon tea. It would be fair to say that Bob Brown is enjoying a comfortable retirement. “I’ve never been happier,” he says earnestly.
Bob, 72, and Paul, 61, have invited The Weekly to spend a day with them on Paul’s property, 43 hectares of rolling sheep country and bushland on the Huon River, south of Hobart. Further downhill, they have built a new house on the water, which looks out across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel towards the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Without companionship, one could feel precariously balanced on the edge of the world here, but there’s no risk of that.
Paul’s family has been tilling the soil along the Huon for five generations and his brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews are dotted through these hills, alongside the sheep and apple trees. Paul’s father passed away last year, but his mother still lives a stone’s throw away. And Bob and Paul have gathered around them a warm, supportive circle of friends, some of whom will be arriving later to share that roast.
“We’re a family that accepts you, whoever you are and whatever you do, and Bob has become part of our family,” says Paul’s youngest sister, Mary. “I think it was initially a bit of a struggle for our parents – being Catholic – to accept a gay son and his partner, and have them sitting around the family dining table.”
There were some in the local area who struggled with the fact that Paul’s partner was “the famous greenie”, too. “It was a bit of a double whammy,” says Mary, laughing, “but ultimately, getting to know Bob and accepting
Paul and Bob as a couple have been a good thing for all of us.”
Bob and Paul’s paths crossed more than once in the tight-knit world of Tassie politics before they became a couple. They first met back in 1988. Bob held a seat in the Tasmanian Parliament and was already renowned as one of the architects of The Wilderness Society, the Tasmanian Greens and the Franklin River campaign, which proved the power of the green vote in federal politics.
Paul was both a farmer and a seasoned activist who had helped set up the Tasmanian AIDS Council. At the time, the island state had the harshest penalty for homosexual activity in the Western world and Paul approached Bob to speak at a gay rights meeting.
They met again seven years later. Bob was living at Liffey, in the state’s north. “A friend drove up to visit and brought Paul with him,” Bob recalls. He has often said that he “didn’t forget Paul after that visit”, and he didn’t have time to. Paul volunteered to work on the Greens’ campaign for the federal Senate the following year. Camaraderie grew on the campaign trail; they shared a rambling bushwalk on election day. Then, one morning, there was a knock on Bob’s door at half-past seven, “and when I opened it, there was Paul, holding a bag of croissants”. Bob was 52 and Paul was his first romantic partner.
Bob had grown up, one of twins, in a kindly, conservative Presbyterian family in country NSW. His father was a policeman and his mother, the daughter of a dairy farmer, bequeathed to Bob her love of the bush. As a teenager,
Bob struggled in equal measure with his sexuality and his faith. He moved to Sydney to study medicine, then on to Canberra, London and, finally, Launceston. He asked difficult questions at Christian fellowship meetings, contemplated suicide and enrolled in a course of painful “aversion therapy” with electric shocks. It was an unsteady start for a man who would eventually come out, publicly and courageously, in the conservative atmosphere of 1976 Tasmania, and would go on to become the first openly gay member of federal Parliament.
It was a bittersweet irony that Bob found his life partner on the very day he was elected to the Senate and for much of the next 16 years he and Paul would be apart. They made the best of it and on every day the Senate was sitting, Bob hand-wrote a letter home to Paul. “I think Paul has stood very strongly behind Bob in his work and Bob has been able to do the things he’s done because Paul has been part of his life,” says Mary.
Those things have included growing the Greens from a minor player in the Senate to a formidable party with nine senators, one seat in the House of Representatives, and 26 of its members sitting in state and territory Parliaments around the country. Bob led the Greens through the Gillard years, when they held the balance of power in the Senate and negotiated some critical concessions. He was also accused of “political lunacy”, “environmental vandalism” and “ruthlessness” when the party voted against Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme in 2009.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, but
Bob left the Senate in 2012 with a reputation as a man of principle and a staunch advocate for the environment, the peace movement and human rights. ABC journalist Richard Fidler describes him as “one of the few people who you could honestly say has changed Australia.” And Dick Smith, who has been roped into a number of Bob’s causes, has said that he is “a person with compassion and commonsense, but he’s probably 30 years before his time.”
Bob’s retirement from his role as leader of the Greens was a radical change of pace for both him and Paul.
“My farming days are over,” Paul quips. “I’ve become a secretarial assistant. You may not be aware that Bob never uses the computer and when he was in the Senate, he had a staff of 20 to decipher his handwritten notes. Now that’s up to me.”
Bob concedes it’s true. “Paul is there every morning spending an hour or two sorting out invitations and correspondence, and we have far more than we can handle. On the day I retired, somebody asked Paul what he thought I would be doing next and he said he hoped I’d take on a greater share of the domestic duties. I got at least a dozen tea towels in the mail, plus an apron, and I’ve put them to good use.”
The pair has managed to take a couple of long road trips in the past five years, including a three-month drive around Australia. It gave Bob an opportunity to exercise his campfire cooking skills – a specialty is roast banana with sugar and cream. That
trip took in some of the six million hectares of high conservation value land that’s owned or managed by Bush Heritage Australia, the organisation Bob founded with an environment prize he had won in 1990.
“More recently, we sailed up the west coast of Tasmania,” says Bob. “It’s one of the wildest, most beautiful coastlines in the world and something I’d always wanted to do. We sailed into Macquarie Harbour and up the Gordon River, and spent a magnificent afternoon in the sunshine back on the Franklin River.”
They’ve been working through the bucket list but that might have to take a backseat in the coming months as Bob has been drawn back to the barricades. He recently met with members of 13 environment and community groups to discuss a joint response to plans by the Indian company, Adani, to create the world’s biggest export coalmine in central Queensland. The mine would add 4.6 billion tonnes of carbon pollution to the earth’s atmosphere. It would accelerate global warming, dig a hole five times larger than Sydney Harbour, further damage the already struggling Great Barrier Reef and threaten the 67,000 jobs that depend on it.
“Adani is the key to unlocking a global climate catastrophe,” Bob says, “but people standing up for what they believe in is an unbeatable power and if this mine goes ahead, the response will be bigger than the Franklin Dam blockade. I also believe this issue is a vote changer. A big campaign in marginal seats will come if this mine goes ahead and there’s a lot more commonsense out there than politicians imagine.
“The polls say that young people have the greatest environmental sensitivity, but there’s a very determined grey power involved, too. People are worried about the impact of coal mining on global warming and about the impact of global warming on their kids and grandkids. Wherever I speak, I say, ‘If the Adani mine gets underway, I have a good mind to take a busload of people up there and sit in the way.’ Immediately, people come from everywhere saying, ‘How can I get on the bus?’”
Over his years as an activist, Bob has been shot at, abused, received death threats (too many to count) and been beaten with a wheel brace, but he’s not afraid of stepping back into the fray.
“I’m only just getting going,” he says, laughing. His Bob Brown Foundation has recently been battling the Tasmanian government’s anti-protest laws in the High Court and campaigning to protect wild places that have “fallen off the political agenda.”
“Bob’s never been busier. He doesn’t stop to remind himself that he’s 72,” says Paul, who is 11 years his junior.
“I think he’s got that back to front. Surely he means 27!” Bob jokes. Then he adds, more seriously, “While I’m enjoying life, I want to live it with Paul to the full. Knowing your limitations and having a good companion who occasionally puts their hand on your shoulder and says, ‘Have a re-think about this’, is a good position to be in.”
Bob and Paul celebrated their companionship at a commitment ceremony at Liffey in 2008 with their closest family and friends. They have a registered “deed of relationship”, which provides legal recognition in the state of Tasmania and they are supportive of calls for marriage equality, but have no wedding plans of their own. “We’ll just wait and see at the time,” says Bob. “We’re very content the way we are, but we would love to know that young people who want to have a public celebration of their love can do so.
“One of the beautiful things about living so long is having seen the transformation in people’s attitudes
[to sexuality]. In the late ’70s or ’80s, if I went up the street in Hobart or Launceston, the chances were I would be abused or threatened or spat at. Now, almost universally, people are positive. More change needs to come – there are still young people out there who are isolated and mistreated – but it’s fantastic that we’ve come this far.”
“I sometimes have to pinch myself to remember how lucky I am,” says Paul. The sun is setting through clearing skies and he pulls on his boots to go and check on the animals before nightfall. As we leave, I ask
Bob what makes him happiest.
“It’s Paul,” he says, quietly, while Paul’s out of earshot. “He is absolutely the companion from heaven for me. Growing older, you can cope with whatever life throws at you if you have a good companion. And living in Tasmania – is there a more fortunate place on earth? These are the things that make me happiest.”
“I sometimes pinch myself to remember how lucky I am.”