In September 2000 I was elected chair of the board of Greenpeace International. It was so different from anything I had ever done before that many people had trouble grasping it. ‘Greenpeace?’ they’d say. ‘We didn’t know you were a greenie.’ Or, ‘Don’t you mean Greenpeace Australia?’ No one seemed able to accept that I could have got myself a position on the international board of the world’s most famous environmental organisation—and that I had actually been headhunted for the position. The media was equally sceptical, even sneering, in its coverage: ‘The appointment of Dr Summers … has surprised some Australian observers who do not recall the former head of the Office of the Status of Women taking any particular interest in environmental issues’, said a page one article in the Sydney Morning Herald.1
This job did not fit most people’s preconceptions of me; it wasn’t ‘women’, or journalism. Why on earth had I stepped off my familiar path to do something so out of character? Why not? I retorted. Hadn’t I left a safe job in the public service in Canberra to go to New York in 1986? And risked my newly created post-Ms. identity in 1992 to go to Canberra for what was meant to be just a three-month job with Prime Minister Paul Keating? Wasn’t such risk-taking and adventure-seeking what I did? I was no longer the girl who’d been too frightened to stay in New York in the 1970s. Now I was up for practically anything. Most people could not fathom themselves doing anything unpredictable or risky. Nor could they see past their assumptions about the person they thought I was. And being a board chair, for an international organisation, an environmental one at that, did not fit that picture. And I resented this; I was tired of being pigeonholed. I wanted to go wherever life was going to take me.
Yet this step was a huge one—and not just because it defied people’s expectations. It was an abrupt departure from the course I had set for myself. There was no doubt that this serious and important job would disrupt the life that I was feeling contented with because, at last, I was where I wanted to be. It was two years since I had left Good Weekend and I was finally living the writing life. I had just finished a book, an autobiography to be called Ducks on the Pond, which would be published later in 1999. It was my first book in more than fifteen years. I’d been scared that perhaps I did not have another book in me, so I was as relieved as I was proud to have accomplished something large and, I hoped, worthy. (Although I had written a lengthy new introduction for a revised edition of Damned Whores and God’s Police in 1994, I had not completed a new book since Gamble for Power in 1983.) My regular column with the Sydney Morning Herald was my only published writing (and income) at the time. In April, Chip and I had got the job of editing the Australian Author, a three-times a year magazine for writers published by the Australian Society for Authors. We had brought our magazine experience to the task: hiring an art director, insisting on articles being edited, introducing photography and illustrations. We hoped we were turning it into a livelier, well-written and better-looking publication. It was a job we would hold for six years and while it wasn’t Les Temps Modernes, our editing partnership was yet one more rewarding element in the life we continued to enjoy together. We sparked off each other, liked each other’s ideas and got considerable satisfaction from crafting these into interesting magazine pieces. When people asked me what I did, I could point to the magazine, to writing books, journalism, giving speeches and some political activism. It was the life I had yearned for, but always found a rationale for not doing. Now I had finally broken the old patterns. I would soon start my next book. So what was I doing in the Netherlands in July 1999, putting myself forward for a job that, despite being part-time, would involve lots of work and a great deal of international travel? Was I, yet again, trying to sabotage myself? Or was I simply unable to refuse yet another great adventure?
Eindhoven is a small thirteenth-century city in the south of Holland, where Greenpeace International was holding its annual general meeting. As we’d driven in from Amsterdam, we saw that virtually nothing remained of the medieval city; it had been almost completely destroyed by Allied bombs during the liberation in September 1944. The new city, like the conference centre, was squat and ugly, steel and glass, with none of the charm of the canals and centuries-old houses that I’d glimpsed in Amsterdam during my transit. I was in Eindhoven because of a quite unexpected and intriguing opportunity to seek election to the Greenpeace Board. If I was chosen, I would become involved in the leadership of the world’s most famous environmental organisation. While I waited to make my presentation, I stayed in my room, checking the proofs of Ducks; once they were corrected, I would send copies to my mother and to my four surviving brothers, to whom I planned to dedicate the book. It was a story that they were mostly familiar with. Indeed, much of my story was also theirs. I had taped several lengthy conversations with my mother about her life, so she knew what I was proposing to write. I was not expecting my family to have problems with what I had written. I could not have been more wrong.
Meeting the Greenpeace people was a revelation. I suppose I was expecting earnest individuals wearing dreadlocks and sandals. Instead I was confronted with, among others, a surgeon from Brazil, an Israeli sociologist, scientists from England and Germany, a Greek shipping magnate, a Chinese barrister from Hong Kong, and a member of the British House of Lords, all of whom were either Trustees or Executive Directors (EDs) of their national Greenpeace offices. There were 27 of these national and regional offices, mostly in Europe, but also in the Americas, Russia, China (Hong Kong), Japan and Southeast Asia. These people had flown in just for the weekend; some of them, like the Latin Americans and those from Asia, had had to endure flights almost as long as we Australians routinely put up with. I should have realised from the way in which I had been headhunted that Greenpeace was a totally professional organisation. The head of its international board search committee was Ann de Wachter, a long-time member of Greenpeace’s Australian board, who lived in Sydney and had her own public relations firm. When she first approached me, I was sceptical. I had no experience and, frankly, not a huge amount of interest in environmental issues. I was undoubtedly an instinctive greenie, but my previous activism had been mostly around women’s equality issues or, two decades earlier in Sydney, prisons or resident action activities. Ann assured me that Greenpeace had plenty of environmental expertise. They were looking to bring onto the seven-person board someone with a good strategic mind and with media and communications experience.
After I made my presentation, the Trustees (who would elect the new board members) questioned me intently. In introducing myself, I had described my work at OSW, doing the management buyout in New York, and my work in Paul Keating’s office in helping him win an unexpected electoral victory. None of these examples had any direct bearing on the work of Greenpeace, I conceded, but I made the argument that my skills were adaptable and could easily be transferred to the service of this organisation as it headed towards the new millennium. I had not expected either the quality of the discussion, nor the range of subjects put to me. Had I been anticipating talk of zodiacs and whales? Swapping stories on banner drops and other daring exploits? Instead, among other subjects, we talked about population and pacifism. Peter Melchett, the long-term British ED who had previously been a minister in the Callaghan Labor government and who was also an hereditary peer, acknowledged that population growth was one of the biggest threats to the world’s ecology. But it was not a discussion the organisation was prepared to have, he told me. Perhaps a quarter of Greenpeace’s offices were located in countries that were nominally Catholic, and the organisation did not want to embroil itself in the perilous politics of abortion. I absorbed this and resolved to think further about its implications. Then George Vernicos, the gruff-seeming Greek guy who owned ships and who, I later learned, had been imprisoned and tortured during the junta of 1967–74, asked me if I was a pacifist.
‘No, I am not a pacifist, and nor do I think that Greenpeace is a pacifist organisation,’ I responded, ‘its flagship is, after all, called the Rainbow Warrior.’
They seemed to like that answer, but the question had thrown me. I knew non-violence was one of the core principles of Greenpeace, but did that mean it was anti-war? But how could a non-violent organisation support war? I was starting to see that this was a very different Greenpeace from the one I’d imagined. This Greenpeace agonised over the politics, the philosophy and the ethics of what it was trying to do; this was before they even got to the daring campaign strategies that had made Greenpeace a globally known organisation. I had initially been taken aback when I walked into the meeting room and had seen that the Trustees were seated around a three-sided table in alphabetical order according to country, with the country names on white cards in front of them, just like the United Nations. They might as well have had little flags as well. I had assumed a radical body like Greenpeace would have been less formal, less country-focused. I would later learn that the national basis of the organisation’s structure was one of its biggest problems. But after my two days with them, I decided I liked these people. And I liked what they were trying to do. I wanted to be part of it—if they’d have me.
I was elected, but because of a quirk in the meetings calendar, my life with Greenpeace would not start until seven months later, at the board meeting of February 2000 which was held in Italy, at the Castello di Gargonza, a former monastery in Tuscany, not far from Florence. It was not luxurious but it was very classy, because it was so old and was situated on top of a mountain surrounded by forests of fir trees. Again, it was not what I had expected of Greenpeace. (Neither did most of those attending, it turned out, and Italy was reprimanded for choosing such an unsuitable venue. In future, we were to opt for more Spartan accommodation.) But it was in Tuscany that I was exposed to the true complexity of the organisation that was trying to globalise its structure and adapt to the challenges created by the newer offices from the developing world, wanting issues like food and energy security added to the traditional Greenpeace campaigns on whales, nukes, forests, GMOs, toxics and oceans. The organisation’s growth had seemingly stalled, and although it still had more than two million members worldwide, newly energised groups like WWF were becoming competitive. As a body that shunned corporate and government donations, relying solely on individuals and philanthropy, Greenpeace needed to protect and grow its fundraising base while maintaining its campaign integrity. I would discover that funds were more easily raised to save animals or for scary campaigns like toxics and nukes than for the more abstract, yet increasingly urgent changes happening to our climate. No issue would cause us greater angst during my time with Greenpeace. In Tuscany I would also meet the legendary David McTaggart, the feisty Canadian who had argued that Greenpeace needed to be a global organisation to be truly effective. He had created Greenpeace International as a coordinating body that could direct the various national and regional offices to run these global campaigns. And it was his infamous run-in with the French Navy in 1972, when he sailed his small yacht Vega into the French nuclear testing zone in the Pacific Ocean, that led to Greenpeace adopting its signature campaign vessel. French commandos had used inflatables to board the Vega and had then badly beaten McTaggart, but the tough-minded activist was more impressed by their boats than by the beating. He and Bob Hunter, one of Greenpeace’s founders, swiftly concluded they could be put to much better use, and soon inflatables were as synonymous with Greenpeace actions as dropped banners and daring climbs. McTaggart was small and fierce. He was no longer as lean as he’d been when he was sailing, but he was as argumentative and impatient with idiots as I was told he’d always been. He was now retired and living the good life in Italy, and just a few months later he would be killed in a car accident, but that day he was sitting at our board table trying to get us to see things his way. I’ve been privileged a few times in my life to be in the presence of someone who has changed the world and it is a powerful, but paradoxical, experience. How is it that some people are able to draw on capacities that most of us doubt we have? Could we in fact do the same if we really wanted to?
On 1 November 1999 Hazel Hawke launched Ducks on the Pond with an amazingly honest and personal speech. It was four years since Bob Hawke, Labor’s long-serving former Prime Minister, had divorced her so that he could marry his mistress, Blanche d’Alpuget. Hazel had been an extremely popular First Lady, her directness and her sense of humour making her easy to like, and there was immense public sympathy for the way she had been dumped by her husband. I’d had quite a lot to do with her when I was at OSW and we had stayed in touch. I thought she was the perfect person to launch my book about the vicissitudes of being a woman in Australia in the mid-twentieth century, but I was not expecting the frank outpouring contained in her speech. She had received great sustenance from reading Damned Whores and God’s Police back in the 1970s, she said: ‘At a difficult time in my life, and my relationship with Bob, this sort of understanding [my explanation of the damned whores and God’s police roles] that put my own troubles in a wider (and yet a very Australian) context, was a valuable gift.’
But although Hazel Hawke had liked the book, and the beloved Australian novelist Ruth Park had written a generous preface, my mother had taken a very different view. She was beside herself with anger, humiliation and grief at what I had revealed about our family. She especially could not bear, she told me in several letters, that I had told the story of my father’s drinking and of his ill-treatment of me. She conceded it was all true but, she wrote, there was no need to tell the world. And she was horrified at my ‘startlingly sordid’ description of an early and humiliating sexual relationship. ‘Is it necessary to give such salacious detail?’ she’d asked. ‘This is written by Anne Summers, PhD AO, not Barbara Cartland or someone of that ilk.’ I found the letters very hard to read, especially when she told me about the physical and emotional toll it was taking. She had woken one morning after just a few hours sleep: ‘… I felt there was a band of lead across my head, and I immediately remembered that was how I felt when I woke up the morning after Jamie died’. (In 1976 her youngest child, and my little brother, Jamie, had died of cancer at the age of seventeen.) At the same time, I could not understand her anger and her misery. I could not believe she had not understood that I was going to write about these things. I had interviewed her about it! And while I was upset that she was upset, I also was sick of her trying to control and manipulate me, to portray me as someone I was not. She could not accept me as I was. She took the bits she liked, the public acclaim, the Order of Australia, the doctorate, the working for Prime Ministers and knowing famous people (especially when she had photographs of me with them she could display to her friends), but she did not want the rest: the unconventional elements of which she disapproved, the not-staying married, not having children, the essential person I was. She could never understand, or acknowledge, that what made it possible for me to do the things that she could brag about was that I had become a very different person—from her and from the woman she had wanted me to be. I had rejected that person, and the constraints she had had to endure, and I had made my own way. Now I was supposed to suppress my story so she could preserve appearances in front of her snobbish friends. They would be saying that I should have waited till she was dead, she told me. But I was not prepared to pretend that none of these things happened. My father had treated me appallingly, I had been used and abused by a lover, and I had had a botched illegal backyard abortion in 1965 that I was lucky did not kill me. She had spent her life trying to survive by putting on a good front, and while I understood the strategy, it was not the way I was, or wanted to be. I had become a different kind of woman, and the book I had written was my attempt to start telling the story of how I managed it.
For me, the family story was only part of what Ducks on the Pond was about. I’d tried to paint a bigger picture, to capture what life was like for girls like me who grew up in Catholic families in the 1950s, and who were given no encouragement to do anything with their lives except become wives and mothers. My family, and my school, had mirrored the wider society that offered women few opportunities in those grim days. The book’s title had come from a warning phrase called out when a woman was approaching the shearing sheds. It was to alert the men to watch their language, but it had seemed to me the perfect metaphor for the ways women were excluded from most areas of life outside the home. I was part of the generation that decided to challenge and to change that, and my book told my part of the story of how we’d gone about it. I chronicled the early days of the women’s liberation movement, the setting up of Elsie Women’s Refuge, my taking on the huge task of retelling the story of Australian history and society through feminist eyes. But I also had to tell my personal story: having to leave home at seventeen—at a time when that was highly unusual—because of my father’s hostility towards me, getting married at age 22 then separating three years later. I had been frank, perhaps brutal, in the way I told my story, but I felt that I needed the truth as my shield. I had grown up in conservative Adelaide, a city built on secrets and denial, where appearances were what counted and the truth about people’s lives was more often than not concealed. This had damaged me and, I decided, I needed to confront my past in order to give myself a future. It had become almost the mantra of the women’s movement to speak with utter honesty about one’s life, whether it was to reveal a long-sublimated rape, to admit to never having had an orgasm, to confess to fear of speaking out. We called it consciousness-raising, and we believed that the truth gave us both strength and courage. It was high-risk and often disastrous, as not everyone could handle the consequences of having their past lives unfurled to public view, but to me it was logical and self-evident. I had to deal with my past, to try to understand who I now was, and how I had become that person. I could not do that without dealing with my terrible relationship with my father.
I had been looking forward to our family story being read and recognised as the common Australian story that it was. I had naively thought that it might even join the well-known and loved books that sit on so many people’s shelves, because they resonate with who we are. None of this happened. I had some wonderful letters from people who enjoyed my story, including one from a Sydney businesswoman I knew who, astonishingly, revealed to me a life that was almost identical to my own, right down to her father being in the Air Force in the very same town as mine had been, who had also liked to wear women’s clothes and who, also like my father, over time became a spectacular drunk. But my mother was not interested in learning that our life-story had been very common, post World War One. In her view, I had betrayed a trust, I had broadcast our secrets and I had shamed her. She travelled to Sydney to tell me face-to-face how angry and upset she was. I expected an all-out war, as we’d had so many times in the past, such as when I told her I was getting married in a registry office rather than in the Catholic Church, but this time she surprised me. She told me that I had placed a terrible burden on her, but that she would nevertheless return to Sydney for the book launch. She wanted to put on a public display of support for her daughter. On the night you would never have guessed she was anything other than a proud mother of the writer, whose book was being launched in the company of a large crowd of friends at a cocktail party at a fancy restaurant, just across from the Art Gallery of NSW.
In the weeks and months that followed, she wrote to many people, especially to priests and nuns, seeking confirmation for her views. Without exception, they gently disagreed. Friends counselled her to understand the need for writers to tell the truth. Within a year she had reconciled herself to the book, even harassing bookshops to move it to a more prominent position, and proudly noting in her diary when it sold out. She loved and admired Chip—finally there was something or rather someone in my life she could be unreservedly pleased about—and to her immense credit, she had no problem with the difference in our ages. Now she also immersed herself in my Greenpeace life, demanding I send her my detailed itineraries so she could follow my travels, and while she really had no idea what my job involved, she was proud of me. And she was no doubt relieved that her daughter had provided her with another story, something else she could genuinely brag about, which pushed back into the recesses of her pride the book that had caused her such pain.
Bill Darnell, a young Canadian social worker, dreamed up the name Greenpeace in 1971. It was, says an official history of the organisation, a ‘dynamic combination of words that bound together concern for the planet and opposition to nuclear arms in a forceful new vision that would inspire some of the most effective environmental protests of all time’.2 Darnell was one of twelve activists, all of them men and most with either a Quaker or environmentalist background, who in September that year sailed from Vancouver to Amchitka in the Aleutian chain of islands in an old dilapidated 24-metre boat, Phyllis Cormack that was hastily renamed Greenpeace. They were intending to bear witness to a proposed US test of a nuclear bomb in this remote, earthquake-prone part of the world. Their action did not stop that test, which took place on 6 November, but they did unleash a tidal wave of enduring political protests that led to an end to nuclear testing on Amchitka and the beginning of a new, radical and global movement. As the name implied, the movement saw nuclear annihilation as the greatest threat to the environment, and in the early years Greenpeace focused only on that one issue. There were some who believed that opposition to nukes, as they became known in the Greenpeace world, should be the sole campaign. But by 1975 this view was being contested by a group who argued the International Whaling Commission was not doing its job of protecting endangered species of whales. In 1975 the first Greenpeace boats set out to confront the Soviet whaling fleet. Using zodiacs, crewmembers got close to the harpooned and bleeding animals, filmed their death agonies and so initiated what would become a signature form of campaigning for Greenpeace.
Twenty-eight years later, when I joined the Greenpeace Board, the methods were essentially the same—creative and daring actions to dramatise the issues—but the issues themselves had been broadened. Greenpeace now described its mission as being to protect the global commons (its oceans, its climate/ozone, its very existence against the threat of nukes) by campaigning on issues such as ancient forests, toxic substances, nuclear disarmament and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The organisation was also expanding into trade issues, opposing globalisation and many of the actions of international organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. Greenpeace was now global, having opened its first office in a developing country, in Argentina in 1987, and with a growing presence in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Africa would soon be the next horizon. It was grappling with the challenges of operating globally while preserving local ties and loyalties. Greenpeace was also an organisation that had been severely traumatised in July 1985, when agents of the French government had blown up the Rainbow Warrior, which was docked in Auckland Harbour, destroying the boat and killing a photographer who was on board. The stakes had suddenly escalated. Greenpeace was, as they liked to say, making waves. If a government had engaged in murderous actions to stop a Greenpeace boat from observing its nuclear tests then clearly the organisation was having an impact. But it was paying a heavy, perhaps unacceptable, price. Greenpeace was accustomed to run-ins, often violent ones, with governments, and to imprisonment, injunctions, fines and other penalties for taking on powerful interests, but it had never before been the target of a state-sponsored act of terrorism.
During my seven years at Greenpeace, I learned to see the world differently. I developed an informed understanding of the fragility of the planet and I acquired an unexpected and fervent admiration for the people who went to such lengths to protect our earth—and us—from those who, from ignorance or greed, were bringing us closer to extinction. Simply to acquit myself in the job, I needed to acquire a great deal of specialist knowledge in addition to being across our campaign issues and methods, and all the complexities involved in supervising a global organisation in a volatile world. As a board we needed a policy in case a staff member was kidnapped and we had to determine whether it would be a breach of our non-violence policy to have armed guards protect staff in our Amazon office, who had received extremely specific death threats. We pondered having our very right to exist being revoked by governments trying to curb our effectiveness, and we assessed the financial impact of losing tax-deductible status in a major fundraising market. The only boats I’d been on before were ferries but now I had to get my head around a fleet plan, understand the costs of refuelling at sea (and therefore the ongoing viability of the whaling campaign in the Great Southern Ocean) and deal with staffing and pay issues for crews that were totally different from those for the rest of our employees. Probably my proudest moment on the board was in 2006 when I led the decision to commission a new ship. The 58-metre Rainbow Warrior III would be Greenpeace’s first-ever purpose-built boat. It was going to cost 20.8 million euro, but we had guaranteed contributions from the NROs and were confident our supporters would kick-in to ensure Greenpeace could continue to sail this eco-warrior of the waters. I was long gone by the time the ship was launched in July 2011, but the world’s first-ever custom built environmental campaigning vessel was, on all accounts, a masterpiece.
I met some extremely smart people at Greenpeace. It is one thing to be dedicated and courageous and be willing to hang your arse from a fast-moving inflatable to stop illegal fishing or logging, and Greenpeace had dozens of such people, and admirable as they were, the world is not changed by bravery alone. It took big thinking to outwit the world’s governments and corporations, and Greenpeace was fortunate to have plenty of people also able to do that. The challenge was to keep doing it, to adapt to growth, to changing geopolitics and evolving technologies, to learn to age as an organisation without growing sclerotic or failing to plan succession. Like the women’s movement, which was about the same age but whose agenda and tactics were very different, the environmental and anti-war movements that were brought together in Greenpeace helped define my generation. I felt extraordinarily privileged to gain insights into how the organisation survived and endured that those years on the inside gave me.
At the end of 2000, after just a year on the Greenpeace Board, I was persuaded to accept the position of Board Chair. It was an extraordinary honour, and a singular vote of confidence in me, a newbie. I had never chaired a board; indeed, my board experience was quite limited, but I did not let that discourage me. I had leapt in the deep-end before and shown I could learn quickly and adapt to a new culture, and although this was far bigger than anything I’d taken on in the past, I saw no reason why I could not do so again. I was now the titular leader of a global entity with an annual income of around 150 million euro, some 1100 staff, plus the crews of the various Greenpeace ships, and members, defined as anyone who made a donation, numbering 2.4 million. Board Chair was not a high-profile position, because the head of the organisation and the main spokesperson was the International Executive Director (IED) but, as my predecessor set out for me in a handover letter, ‘it requires real leadership ability: vision, strategic thinking, commitment, stamina and the ability to listen to, persuade and inspire people from many different backgrounds and countries.’ The Board Chair, she told me, is ‘the person ultimately responsible for ensuring the core values of the organisation are upheld, namely: non-violence, non-party political, bearing witness, peaceful confrontation and respect for all life’. In practical terms, this meant I was required to lead the board’s supervision of the performance of the IED, including oversight of his management of the global campaigns, and to approve and monitor the 27 million euro annual budget of Greenpeace International (GPI). Those two simple-sounding tasks entailed being across every aspect of the operations of this large and complex organisation, and since I was so new I had a lot of learning to do. I had to learn the history, the culture, the politics and the people, and fast. When I’d started new jobs in the past, I’d always immersed myself in the history of the place, reading as much as I could, and I’d talk to people from inside and outside, people who knew what was what, people I knew would not mislead me. I’d done this at PM&C and at Ms. magazine, and I would do the same at Greenpeace but while I could learn a lot in Amsterdam, where GPI was headquartered, I would also need to travel. I decided to try to visit every one of our offices, adding a side trip to at least one new country each time I travelled. It turned out to be too ambitious a plan, but I did manage to visit all our offices in Latin America, East Asia, North America and most of Europe. I did not make it to Turkey or Israel or Lebanon or India, and my trip to Russia was cut short so that, sadly, I did not get to experience the eleven time zones and vast differences of that remarkable country, including a planned visit to Lake Baikal.
I made around six international trips a year, to Amsterdam and to whichever country was hosting that year’s AGM, had weekly phone meetings with the IED, as well as wrangling a never-ending email feed. It was not a full-time job, although it often felt as if it was. I was the first Board Chair from the Southern Hemisphere in the organisation’s almost 30-year history which meant my (economy class) travel was long and exhausting, and the weekly phone meetings with the IED were always at a difficult time of the day or—more often—night. Despite Greenpeace being nominally a global organisation, in reality it was utterly Eurocentric. Fourteen of the 27 national offices were in Europe, which distorted global governance, as each office had an equal vote. It meant that, for instance, Switzerland, or tiny Luxembourg, had on paper at least the same influence as the United States or the soon-to-be established offices in India and China. I spent a great deal of my tenure arguing for a more representative structure, but while there was some agreement that we should change, no office wanted to surrender its power.
The beginning of my tenure at Greenpeace coincided with Chip spending a year in Beijing where he undertook advanced studies in Mandarin at Tsinghua University. The time apart meant co-editing the Australian Author remotely and celebrating the beginning of the new millennium at separate iconic global locations—he on the Great Wall, me at the Sydney Opera House. But when I visited we travelled widely, to a number of cities and to more remote places such as the sacred island of Putuoshan, giving us both experiences and insights into China. These were invaluable for me when Greenpeace opened an office in Beijing in 2002, and helped Chip develop a fascination with China that saw him return to live there for a further year in 2004, this time in Shanghai, teaching English. Our lives also developed parallel paths, when in the early 2000s, Chip became a member of the international board of the writers’ organisation, PEN International, which required him to travel, mostly to Europe, almost as often as I did. We found there were many similarities with these two global bodies, each trying to reconcile their international focus with their European origins.
For the seven years I served on the board, six of them as chair, in addition to whatever specific topics or emergencies might present themselves, we also engaged in a never-ending discussion about the future direction of Greenpeace. Very early in my tenure, we were presented with an impressive argument for why we should abandon all other campaigns and concentrate just on climate. Elaine Lawrence, the international campaigns director, a phlegmatic Englishwoman with long straight dark hair that was starting to fleck with grey, made the presentation. She had been with Greenpeace for many years, initially in the UK before she moved to Amsterdam, and she had an outstanding strategic brain. She also had the ability to reach rapid and wryly delivered assessments of people. Elaine had observed to me one day that because every one of the young Dutch women who had recently applied for jobs at Greenpeace had been more than 182 centimetres tall, she expected the organisation would soon be transformed into an Amazonian army.
Elaine laid out for the board with cool precision the evidence of the changes that were occurring to the climate that would impact on the earth’s temperature and, in time, its very viability. Climate change was, she argued, as big a threat to the actual existence of the planet as nukes had once been. On that logic, the organisation ought to set aside all its other work and devote itself entirely to campaigning against climate change. It was hard to disagree. But I was still very new. I had yet to understand the silo mentality of campaigners for the other issues, and the tenacity with which they resisted any suggestion ‘their’ issue ought not to be Greenpeace’s top priority. These arguments around climate would dominate my time at Greenpeace and they were, I was given to understand, every bit as impassioned as the first big policy division over nukes and whales in the mid-1970s. It was never resolved. There were other factors apart from the resistance from other campaigns. Climate change was a complex issue. It did not have the emotional appeal of Saving the Whales, or the immediacy of the threat of a hole in the ozone layer. Climate change was abstract. The dangers it posed could not be summed-up in a simple slogan. We had banners that said Save the Climate, but what did that mean? In places like Russia, global warming was seen as welcome relief from their frigid winters, so we learned to stick to the language of ‘climate change’. And there was now further competition from new issues like food security being put on the Greenpeace agenda by our new offices in the developing world. These were impossible to ignore, or to relegate to reduced importance.
Greenpeace’s head office in Amsterdam was in a grand 1905 building, designated a national monument, on the corner of Keizersgracht, one of the three major canals that circle the city, and Leliegracht, a smaller feeder canal. The grey-stone building with its clock tower, steep slate roofs and a mural painted high-up on the front wall, was an architectural curiosity. Now it housed a group of people dedicated to peace and to saving the world’s environment. The building sprawled over six floors, around a magnificent central wooden staircase, with leaded-glass windows and dozens of tiny rooms that cascaded off passageways in all directions. It was a beautiful place, but totally impractical for modern office arrangements. I was sad, but could not make a plausible counter-argument, when the board had to agree to the organisation’s relocation to a soulless office block in the suburbs. It made sense to have everyone on just two floors, with open planning, everyone in sight of each other, constantly in contact and everyone aware of what was happening.
One of my first tasks as Board Chair had been to lead the search for a new IED. The organisation could have been severely disrupted by an unexpected turn of events, that resulted in the unprecedented situation of its two top leadership positions becoming vacant at the same time. With me being essentially an outside recruitment, it seemed important to try to fill the IED job from within Greenpeace, and fortunately in Gerd Leipold we had the ideal candidate. Although he was currently working outside the organisation, he had been the ED of the German office in the 1980s and had run the international disarmament campaign from 1987 to 1992. He had a deep knowledge of and was widely known and respected within Greenpeace, and thus could jump right in without a lengthy induction. During his six years in the job, among many other achievements, Leipold presided over the global expansion of Greenpeace, opening offices in India, China and the Amazon and began the first steps for a presence in Africa, a new frontier for Greenpeace.
Despite our very different backgrounds, Leipold and I got on immensely well. He was a scientist, a meteorologist and oceanographer, and a multilingual European. Both of us tried to shuck-off the stereotypes of our nationalities; I made sure to be extremely punctual and efficient, while Gerd allowed himself to relax and joke in ways that were in contrast to the usual seriousness of many of our German colleagues. In Crete in 2004, we had all been amazed at the extraordinary number of corpulent middle-aged German tourists sharing the hotel where we were having our AGM. ‘Which was worse,’ Gerd asked our bemused waiter. ‘The German invasion of 1941, or this one?’
In August 1983, Gerd and an Englishman John Sprange had flown a hot-air balloon over the Berlin Wall into East Germany, in an action for peace and disarmament. It was a very dangerous operation; they risked being shot out of the sky by the trigger-happy East German military. Fortunately, they were allowed to land, arrested and, after a five-hour detainment, expelled back to the West.3 Gerd told me later that during the 40-minute flight he had not had time to be frightened, because he and Sprange had been arguing about a girl they both liked.
I’d been surprised to discover that Greenpeace’s largest office was not Canada, where the organisation was founded, nor the United States, the world’s richest country. It was Germany that was the financial and political backbone of Greenpeace. The German office was the largest, the richest, the best organised, and it underwrote the rest of Greenpeace for the time I was there. There was tremendous support for Greenpeace among the German population, enabling them to be immensely innovative. They branched into service provision, opening an alternative power company and developing Greenfreeze, an ozone-friendly refrigerant that is in widespread use today. Germany was very into ‘green’—the world’s first Green Party had been started there—but it was also obsessed with peace. The anti-nuke sentiments were stronger in Germany than perhaps anywhere else. I found myself wondering what drove these German people, how much their activism and optimism was driven by an element of atonement. Most Germans I encountered were of an age to have parents who would have been involved in the war, but we never talked about it. Nor, it seems, did they. I began to understand why, when I came across the writings of W.G. Sebald, a German writer who had lived in England for most of his life until his premature death in a road accident in December 2001. I had read Sebald’s essay, ‘A Natural History of Destruction’, in the New Yorker4 in 2002, an excerpt from his book of the same name, about the carpet-bombing of Hamburg by the British. Sebald argued that the utter destruction of most German cities at the end of the war, causing more than 600,000 deaths, had brought about a kind of collective amnesia in the post-war population. The subject was simply not discussed, nor written about—even by writers like Heinrich Böll, who explored every other area of Germany’s wartime conduct.
‘There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described,’ Sebald wrote. ‘The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.’
I gave a copy of the essay to Gerd. I think we were in Hamburg at the time. We talked about the horrors of the firebombing where hundreds of people simply melted, and the rebuilding of the city from the rubble, but we did not talk about Sebald’s central proposition which, if I read him correctly, was that many Germans felt they deserved this retaliatory bombing, but it was not something that could be acknowledged publicly and, thus, it was ‘forgotten’, and never discussed. But the Germans in Greenpeace were addressing the subject by remaking their society, doing what they could to ensure history was not repeated.
I started my Greenpeace education in Hamburg. If Amsterdam was the head of global Greenpeace, the warehouse in Hamburg was, in many ways, its operational headquarters. Harald Zindler guided me around. He was a solid man with a big head of grey hair, who was even more legendary than the warehouse itself. He had been an original member of the German office in 1981 and his aphorism, ‘The optimism of the action is better than the pessimism of the thought’, adorned the title page of the official history of Greenpeace. He’d previously been an anti-nukes campaigner. Now he was custodian of the warehouse. It was located on an island in the middle of Hamburg harbour and was spread over several storeys with various rooms designated for particular activities. It was able to support and equip any Greenpeace action anywhere in the world. An enormous internal space at water level contained dozens of inflatable boats of every conceivable size; these were the workhorses of the organisation. We needed protective clothing just to go into the state-of-the-art hazmat facility. Greenpeace had the capability to assess the toxicity of any waste dump, any toxic spill, any nuclear mishap. Standing in that room in Hamburg, looking up at shelf-upon-shelf of the most toxic substances known to humankind, I shuddered. Greenpeace’s hazmat stockpile was easily the most comprehensive in the country, if not the whole of Europe. Zindler told me that the German police and fire department experts regularly came over to the warehouse to top up their knowledge.
My favourite part of the warehouse was the banner-making department. It occupied a huge space with natural light pouring in through large square windows. There were massive tables, able to take metres-long rolls of canvas, where banners were made using the same techniques as for sail-making. It was hardly surprising that a nautical organisation such as Greenpeace would have expertise in sail-making, but what fascinated me was the way they had adapted that process to serve a political end. Most of the smaller Greenpeace offices could not afford such facilities, so the Germans had designed a system to fulfill orders for banners from around the world. The designs and the required dimensions were emailed to the German warehouse. It was, of course, critical that there be no errors in the wording that was most often in a language other than German (or English, which most of the German office staff spoke fluently). They were now also having to accommodate themselves to different scripts as our offices in Thailand and China started doing actions. I was shown the steps whereby the little design on the email would be blown up onto a large screen from which the banner would be printed. Some of these banners were many metres wide, or long. They would be shipped-off to their destination and, weeks later, their German creators, if they happened to be watching the television news, might see their handiwork draped over a building in Brazil, or hanging from a ship in the Indian Ocean. It was an impressive display of international cooperation and smart use of resources. I could see why the German warehouse was spoken of in awe almost everywhere in the Greenpeace world I visited.
I learned to appreciate that behind the romantic images of Greenpeace ships on the high seas, or the daring exploits of activists abseiling down high buildings, was a highly skilled and developed organisation. I came to respect the meticulous planning and the risk assessments that went into every activity. Of course, it would have been irresponsible, even murderous, to allow activists to engage in some of the dangerous actions that were the organisation’s signature, without taking every care to protect their lives. In 30 years, despite the extraordinary feats many of them undertook, for example, dangling a sign from the top of London’s Big Ben or Rio’s Christ the Redeemer, or playing chicken from a rubber inflatable with a US nuclear warship, no campaigner had been killed or disabled during an action. A couple of people had suffered serious injuries, however, and we had a duty of care towards helping with their recovery. And as a non-violent organisation, Greenpeace was committed to ensuring that no one else was harmed as a result of our actions. I was told about a staff member who had been disciplined for cutting the anchor chain of a boat moored in a European port harbour, potentially endangering the crew onboard. And during my time there was a fierce debate in the UK office about whether invading fields and ripping out GM crops was a violent act and therefore unjustifiable, or whether it was a legitimate destruction of plants that had the capacity to contaminate the food chain.
There were just two ships in the Greenpeace fleet when I started: the MV Arctic Sunrise as well as the flagship, the MV Rainbow Warrior. There were also a couple of smaller, European-based boats that did not count as part of the fleet, and some planes, including our helicopter, Tweety. The ships were easily identifiable, their hulls painted a deep green with the rainbow across their bows. They were a familiar and inspiring sight. The first time I saw the Rainbow Warrior was when it sailed into Sydney Harbour for the 2000 Olympics. I found myself feeling quite emotional as I watched the totemic boat passing the iconic Sydney Opera House. The Rainbow Warrior was as famous and, in its own way, as significant a force for peace as any human world figure.
The fleet expanded when the MV Esperanza, its refit completed, was launched in February 2002. It was a former Russian firefighting boat, previously named the Echo Fighter; the organisation had spent several million euro refitting it for Greenpeace purposes, installing cranes to lift the inflatables, and a helicopter landing-pad. There had been an internal competition to name this newest boat with the Spanish and Latin American offices waging a fierce fight to ensure the Spanish word for ‘hope’, would beat Gaia, the other contender. The Esperanza also had the advantage of being ice-class, which meant it could be deployed in Arctic or Antarctic waters. It was the largest ship in the Greenpeace fleet, with 33 berths, a speed of 16 knots and able to accommodate two large and four small inflatables.
The inflatables, often referred to disparagingly as Greenpeace’s ‘rubber boats’, but whose technical name is RHIBs, or rigid-hulled inflatable boats, were a critical element in any marine operation. The larger ships of the fleet would get the activists as close as possible to the whaling ship or the logging boat, the inflatables would then be lowered, and the actions crew would clamber down and roar off to undertake the planned action. The inflatables came in many sizes, able to accommodate from four to more than twenty people. What made them indispensable was their ability to travel at high speeds through rough seas. The only time I was on one, ferried from the Rainbow Warrior to the shore in New Zealand, I found the ride terrifying as we bumped hard across the waves, at what seemed like a dangerously fast speed.
I had worked hard and was now feeling relatively comfortable in my role as Chair of GPI. I had mastered the lingo, including a mind-numbing array of acronyms that people in Greenpeace used to talk to each other, I knew all the key people and was across most of the policy issues. I was now someone who could confidently chair a rambunctious meeting of Trustees and EDs. As with the board, I ran tight meetings that always got through the agenda and finished on time. I’d got rid of the three-sided table and the country nametags. Everyone now sat comfortably at round tables at what conference organisers call ‘cabaret-style’, and were free to move around during proceedings. I’d also started an internal newsletter to keep the organisation informed about what the board was up to, and created a ‘buddy system’ between board members and Trustees, as an induction and knowledge-sharing tool. Notionally, we liked to describe ourselves as ‘One Greenpeace’ but we needed to reduce geographic, cultural and language barriers. In 2001 we welcomed India’s new ED to his first international meeting. Ananthapadmanabhan Guruswamy, who insisted we simply called him Ananth, had been selected from 1000 applicants. He was a brilliant choice who would soon make an impact on the entire organisation. Our Beijing office opened the next year. Greenpeace was going to places it needed to be, and I felt proud to be there while it was happening. Sometimes, I had to ask myself, Am I really here? Doing this? I felt lucky, but I also knew that I would not be where I was without the lift I’d been given early in my life.
In December 1999, I had received an extraordinary handwritten letter from Wales, from a man called Roger Ellis. He had been sent Ducks on the Pond, he told me, by a former nun at Cabra Convent in Adelaide, where I had gone to school. He wanted me to know that for the past 30 years he had been happily married to the nun who had been my primary school teacher at Cabra, the woman who had changed my life. I’d recounted in the book how Sr Mary Vianney had pulled me aside after I’d been in trouble for some larrikinish behaviour, and spoken to me sharply. She’d told me to stop hanging-out with girls who were idiots, to stop behaving like an idiot myself, and to start using the brain that I so obviously had.
‘You do not have to accept the given,’ she had said to me. ‘You have the ability to be different, to shape the world to your liking.’
No one had ever spoken to me like that. Without her words, I doubt I would be the person I am today, so I was quite overwhelmed to get this letter. Two months later, during a Greenpeace trip to London, I took an extra day and in February 2000 I travelled to Wales by train to meet Kate Vianney. She had been Lillian Horgan before she entered the convent, and I wondered why she had retained her religious name. It was too much part of her to relinquish, I surmised, but I had no idea where Kate had come from. Roger had warned me that Kate had Alzheimer’s and probably would not remember me. It had been more than forty years. Her face was scarcely recognisable but those eyes that I remembered still flickered with the fierce intelligence she’d used to rescue this lost girl. She did not need to know I was there. I was the one who needed to honour and thank her. Just as I needed to make another pilgrimage, this time to Paris in the winter of 2001, in order to acknowledge another debt.
I was there to meet the French office and attend a local board meeting, but instead of the hotel recommended by Greenpeace, I’d booked myself into the Hotel la Louisiane at 60 rue du Seine, a few paces off Boulevard Saint Germaine on the Left Bank. It was a ratty little place, with maybe three stars, but it had a history. The Rolling Stones used to stay in the 1960s as did a number of black jazz musicians fleeing racism in 1950s America whose lives were depicted in the 1986 Bertrand Tavernier movie Round Midnight. But I was there because during World War II, Simone de Beauvoir had lived there and it was in Room 50, ‘a large round room with a kitchenette’, according to her biographer Deirdre Bair, that she had written at least part of The Second Sex.5 I had booked myself into one of the hotel’s three ‘round rooms’, rooms that because they were at the apex of the v-shaped building were much larger than the hotel’s other mean-sized chambers. Although the room numbers were different now, I believed from a photograph in Hazel Rowley’s book6 that I was in the room in which de Beauvoir had begun the book that was the other major influence in starting me on the road to who I am today.
Despite all my travelling to Greenpeace offices, I had never managed to take part in an action until September 2002 when I travelled to Manaus, the city in the heart of the Amazon. Manaus is famous for its opulent Teatro Amazones Opera House, opened in 1897 and built from the rubber fortunes that had transformed this tiny hamlet into the thriving town it now was. Although we already had a longstanding office in Brazil, located in Sao Paulo, GPI decided we also needed a presence in the heart of the Amazon. It would serve as a base for campaigning against the destruction of the Amazon basin by deforestation through illegal logging and, an increasing threat, mass clearance of lands for agriculture, especially soya and cattle. Anne Dingwall, another Greenpeace veteran, was appointed Amazon Campaign Coordinator and it was her job to open the office, find the staff and get the operation underway. She was experienced at this, having already set up the Russian and Hong Kong offices. Anne was Canadian, rail thin, a bundle of nervous energy who seldom had a cigarette out of her hand, and who radiated a compelling aura of warmth and competence. I liked her immediately and she was an excellent guide as she took me around the multiple terrains of Greenpeace. She was almost as indispensable as Jenny Stannard was during my six years as Board Chair. Jenny was board assistant, responsible for all logistics around our meetings including producing, assembling, then dispatching our voluminous board papers—Greenpeace liked its paper—as well as keeping me on top of everything I needed to be doing. She was a vivacious and perpetually cheerful person, originally from England, but who had lived in the Netherlands for decades now. She had been McTaggart’s right-hand woman for years, which meant there was nothing about Greenpeace she did not know, and she had become a kind of unofficial guardian of the organisation’s history. She was always there, my beacon and my support. My enduring image of Jenny is her listening to Kind of Blue while she transcribed the minutes of an especially rambunctious session of an AGM meeting in Mexico. She could always find tranquillity in the heart of any turmoil. A truly excellent person to work with.
I inspected the new office in Manaus with its already-impressive amount of equipment, including of course a good supply of inflatables, then Anne and I flew in the Fat Duck, Greenpeace’s small aquaplane, to Porto de Moz, a region in northern Brazil where anti-logging action was happening on a tributary of the Amazon. Greenpeace was there to support the local community who wanted to protect their lands from illegal logging. For the several hours it took us to travel the almost 900 kilometres, we skimmed above the dense vegetation. As someone who was an extremely nervous flyer then, I was amazingly relaxed, enjoying it even. We were more connected to earth than in a jetliner, I told myself, and that made it feel safer. As we came into land on the river we could see MV Veloz, the bright blue riverboat Greenpeace had chartered. The rest of the team was already on board. The local community had formed a barricade across the river, comprising approximately 50 boats, with some 400 people on board, that was intended to block the expected barge of illegal logs. We settled in to wait. I was only able to stay a couple of days, and I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to still be there if a confrontation happened. I admit to being nervous, scared even. We were well aware of the loggers’ reputation for violence. Many people had been murdered for trying to resist them. We were in a very isolated part of the Amazon basin. There were less than a handful of police in Porto de Moz, and we didn’t know if they would intervene if the loggers became violent. Everyone was tense, but we all knew better than to show it. Shipboard routine had to be adhered to and that mostly meant cooking, serving and cleaning up after the three meals each day. I did my best to be useful. Anne and I were by far the oldest people on board and we found we had lots to talk about, including (we were surprised to discover, since we were from different countries) that we were both taking the same brand of HRT.
That night we settled into the deep darkness of the river. It was still and, at first, quiet. Then we began to hear a noise that sounded like someone slapping themselves and, it turned out, that is exactly what it was. The people on the boats making up the barricade were slapping their skin each time a mosquito landed. We on the big blue boat, with our tropical-strength repellant, were protected but the locals had no such luxury. All night, until I eventually fell asleep, I could hear the gentle slaps. As soon as it was light, I noticed a number of small boats were heading towards us.
‘What is going on?’ I asked one of the crew.
‘They know we have a doctor on board.’
For the rest of the day, after patiently waiting their turn, the occupants of the next boat would come alongside and a child, or an old man, or anyone who needed medical assistance would be helped on board. Our doctor, a young woman, worked all day, bandaging, medicating, soothing. One old man had a machete gash so deep I wondered that his arm did not fall off. A number of children were feverish. I felt humbled and proud watching this. I had known of Greenpeace’s rescue efforts during Hurricane Mitch in 1998, when we’d sent the Rainbow Warrior to Nicaragua with clothes, food and medical supplies. I was to learn that although Greenpeace is not an aid organisation, it frequently helped out if needed. Our ships turned out to have many uses apart from chasing Japanese whalers. It was not a role we had sought and certainly not one that we had advertised, but we could not turn these people away, even though by the end of the day our own medical supplies were running low. We needed to be prepared in case of a violent reaction from the loggers. Then, as the light was fading, a new boat approached. On board was a young woman who was moaning. She was helped on board, but soon it was apparent that there was a problem. The doctor conferred with the action team. The RHIB jet boat was deployed, the engine revved up, the woman was lowered onto the boat and, with the doctor and two young Greenpeace men beside her, they sped off into the gathering darkness.
The woman was miscarrying. The doctor said she needed urgent medical help, beyond what she could offer. There was no hospital anywhere near us but Porto de Moz, the small town about an hour’s fast ride up the river, had a clinic. The fit young men did not hesitate and I found myself strangely moved by the way they quickly readied the inflatable and prepared to take off in near darkness. When they got there the clinic was closed. The Greenpeace team did their best, waking up the town trying to find help, but there was none to be had. The young woman lost her baby. I have seldom seen young men more dejected and defeated than these two actions guys when they returned. To me, they were heroes, but they were more than that. They were the kind of men who could tend a miscarrying young woman one evening and, a few days later, engage in an extraordinary act of bravery that saved as many as 80 lives when the confrontation finally came.
It happened a few hours after I left. After three days the Fat Duck had picked me up and sped me back to Manaus, so I missed the arrival of the barge of logs being pushed by a tugboat. I am indebted to Anne Dingwall for this account of what happened next. The tugboat was captained by Andre Campos, whose brother was the mayor of nearby Porto de Moz, and since it was unable to proceed due to the barricade, Campos secured the tug to trees on the riverbank with cables, leaving the barge drifting perilously close to the boats forming the barricade. There followed a tense discussion between Campos and community leaders, who wanted it moved further upstream. Campos agreed to secure the cables more tightly, but would not move the barge. It was agreed they would negotiate further the next morning. However, just after midnight, when almost everyone was asleep, Campos released the cables and began trying to crash through the barricade. David Logie and Todd Southgate, the Greenpeace action guys, were having a few drinks on the deck of the Veloz when they heard the sound of the tug starting. Yelling a warning to the small boats to get out of the way, the two young men deployed the jet boat, and at full throttle rammed the barge, forcing it into the riverbank. The Veloz then started up and used its weight to keep the tug pinned to the bank. There was some fighting, several people were injured, but the tugboat’s keys were seized and the blockade was ended.
Subsequently Andre Campos was arrested, the barge with its illegal cargo of over 100 logs was seized, and its owners fined a substantial sum. Two years later, the Federal Verde para Sempre (Green Forever) Extractive Reserve for sustainable use of Amazon rainforest resources was established. The local population of approximately 2250 families had won the right to their land. It was a low-key action by Greenpeace standards, conducted far away from the media spotlight, but it succeeded in assisting a local community and it marked another milestone in the battle for the Amazon. I was sorry I was not there to witness it.
In October 2001, I had gone to Prague to attend Forum 2000, an exclusive invitation-only five-day event hosted by President Vaclev Havel, the formerly imprisoned political dissident, poet and playwright, who was now the President of the Czech Republic. It was rare for me to represent the organisation in a gathering such as this, but the ED in Greenpeace’s Czech office was insistent that it would help their standing if the international Board Chair attended. Forum 2000 had been founded five years earlier as a joint initiative of Havel, Japanese philanthropist Yohei Sasakawa, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel. It was designed to address human rights, civil society, and other issues relevant to the globalising 21st century, and the guest list each year included famous political, cultural and religious figures. Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger and the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng had attended in previous years. I was both excited and slightly in awe of what awaited me.
I’d flown in from Amsterdam on 14 October and discovered that another invitee, Francis Fukuyama the famous political scientist, was on the same flight. We’d been given VIP treatment upon arrival at Prague Airport, escorted from the plane before the other passengers and, bypassing immigration, taken straight to the tarmac, where a line of cars waited. Following what I thought were my directions, I started to climb into the first car, a silver Mercedes. There was some shouting, which I could not understand, from the men who had met us, and I was roughly pulled from the Merc and pushed towards the car behind it, a small battered Skoda. The Mercedes was for Dr Fukuyama. A little over a month earlier, the terrorist attacks on the United States seemed to disprove Fukuyama’s celebrated thesis that we had arrived at ‘the end of history’. He had posited in his best-selling book of the same name that the end of the Soviet era, dramatised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, showed ideology no longer mattered. We had reached ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. The West had won, in other words. His thesis was now looking a little shaky. Nevertheless, he got the good ride. He was a man, and this was indisputably a man’s world. Only nine of the 50 invited guests were women. There might have been notional equality of the sexes prior to the Velvet Revolution that had brought Havel to power in Czechoslovakia, but as I discovered during the Forum, it was no longer in evidence, seemingly discarded as just one more superfluous communist value. These Eastern European flunkeys made no effort to disguise their hostility towards me, even when a couple of them came to get me for my audience with the President.
Havel had asked to see me. He was very interested in Australia and had visited several times. I’d joined the throng in an old pub in The Rocks a year or so earlier when the visiting President had expressed a wish to meet writers and journalists in a relaxed environment. It had been too crowded to get close to him that evening, but now it was just the two of us. He looked just like his photographs, but he seemed slightly harried, which was not surprising given the big crowd of important guests, and that he was having to deal with the last-minute cancellation by some of the American participants, a few short weeks after the 11 September attacks. We were in a small anteroom in the lavish castle that could not have been further away, in style and comfort, from the prison cells where he had spent more than five years as a political prisoner. Havel was polite and tried to engage me but our meeting was perfunctory and awkward. He wanted to talk about Australia’s Aboriginal people but his English was poor, my Czech non-existent, and no one had thought to provide an interpreter. We gave up after a few stilted moments, and I was escorted away by the same grim-looking men who had forced me to ride in from the airport in the crappy little car while the male guest travelled in style.
The Forum took place in the magnificent Prague Castle, supposedly the largest castle in the world, dating from the ninth century, and displaying a wide array of architectural styles. We met in lavish chambers where the walls were gold, the furniture baroque and the chandeliers crystal. It reminded me of Versailles. My fellow guests included Shimon Peres, F.W. de Klerk, HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of the Jordanian royal family, José Ramos-Horta, and several dozen other current or up-and-coming world leaders, whose names I was not yet familiar with.7 In mid-October all of us were still trying to digest the shocking events of the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September that was the reason for many of the American guests cancelling. Jeffrey Sachs, the once conservative economist who’d become an activist against poverty in developing countries, was beamed in via video-link. Bianca Jagger who was supposed to be on a panel with me did not show and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been Ronald Reagan’s (and the first woman) US Ambassador to the United Nations, was another who was afraid to fly. I was asked to deliver a keynote in her stead. But to everyone’s amazement, Bill Clinton came.
I’d been in Toronto, intending to fly to New York later that day, when the planes struck. Greenpeace had been founded in September 1971 and we were planning to celebrate 30 years of activism and innumerable victories in defence of the planet with a series of events, including some very high-level fundraising activities, in New York. The Rainbow Warrior was sailing up the east cost of the US, headed for the Chelsea Piers where we were going to hold a fancy cocktail party on 12 September. I tried without success that crazy, scary day to reach Gerd Leipold, who was somewhere on the west coast; we had planned to meet up in New York that evening. Once we connected, the next day, we had to try to digest the implications for Greenpeace of this unprecedented act of terrorism. We would need to find the right words to console and reassure our American colleagues, to set the tone to guide the rest of the organisation as it began to grapple with this new kind of war, and its yet-unknown consequences. Before long, the Americans would dictate new maritime rules that would restrict our free movement on and off our ships wherever they docked around the world, political surveillance would increase, as would the aggressive prosecution of our activists, especially around our opposition to nuclear issues such the ‘Star Wars’ missile defence system.
The day before the attack, on 10 September, I’d found myself surrounded by the Canberra Press Gallery as I flew from Sydney to Los Angeles, en route to Toronto. John Howard was flying commercial for some reason, so the travelling party was all aboard that Qantas jet. I was chatting with Michelle Grattan when they were all summonsed to the front of the plane; the Prime Minister wanted to talk to them. When they returned some 30 minutes later, Grattan told me that Howard had briefed them that he was excising Christmas Island from Australia. They would file the story when we landed at Los Angeles in about ten hours time. In future, no people arriving by boat at this remote Indian Ocean Island that, until now, had been part of Australia, would be able to claim asylum. As we flew across the Pacific, we pondered the politics of this extraordinary move, this pitiless declaration of war on some of the most vulnerable people on earth, none of us knowing how much worse it was going to get for them when the world changed so profoundly the very next day.
Bill Clinton had been in Australia, holidaying in Port Douglas in Far North Queensland, at the time of the attacks. The Australian military had helped get him back to the US while commercial flights remained restricted, but he was not grounding himself in the aftermath. His presence in Prague that day was an exemplary act of courage. There are several things for which I cannot forgive Bill Clinton: the pardoning of financial fugitive Marc Rich, nor the abuse of his power with the exploitation of a young woman’s emotions in the Monica Lewinsky episode, but he was absolutely a hero for making this trip to the Forum. Until January that year he had been President of the United States, and while he was now technically just a private citizen, albeit one who would forever be able to use the title President, his very presence was a powerful act of moral leadership. He sat at the head of a simple table in that extravagantly baroque gilt and mirrored room as dozens of us delegates crammed around. He spoke in those low, slow tones of his so that we had to lean forward to catch his words. He consoled us, he empathised with the shock most of us were still feeling and, most important of all, he encouraged us not to lose sight of the issues that had brought us all to Prague. Bill Clinton has a remarkable way with words, and that day those of us who were privileged to be present experienced the kind of healing that made him such a potent politician.
At my session, there were just two others at the table: Vandana Shiva the Indian environmentalist and F.W. de Klerk, the former President of South Africa. He was the man who on 11 February 1990 had released Nelson Mandela after 27 years of imprisonment. In 1993, he and Mandela had jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize. De Klerk was that rare kind of man in politics: both brave and creative. He had shocked his colleagues, and the world, on 2 February 1990 by announcing the end of apartheid and the introduction of democracy to South Africa. He was already preparing the ground for Mandela’s release nine days later.
I had read Allister Sparks’s long and illuminating article in the New Yorker, in April 1994, that described the lengthy talks and processes that preceded Mandela’s release. Most of them were conducted outside the prison, in government buildings, including an initial meeting between de Klerk and Mandela in the Prime Minister’s office, even in ministers’ private homes. (Mandela recalled later being offered his first alcoholic drink in 22 years at one of these gatherings; it was a creamed sherry, and he said it tasted like nectar.) De Klerk understood that South Africa’s—indeed the world’s—most famous prisoner would need time to adjust to the outside world after his long incarceration. He arranged for Mandela, who by now had been transferred to a prison in Paarl, not far from Cape Town, to be driven around, to towns and to the countryside, to see the way the world had changed. He was taken, in what must have been an unconscious act of ironic cruelty, to Stellenbosch. It was the nearest town, but it was still the ideological centre of apartheid. The whole thing was a very risky operation. Mandela’s release might have been thwarted if word had got out that it was about to happen. Once, at a petrol station, Mandela spoke to the attendant who appeared to recognise him.8
De Klerk was kind and courteous towards me but I found myself tongue-tied; I so wanted to tell him how much I admired what he had done, but I did not want to appear gauche. This was a serious political gathering, not a fan club. I envied the facility with which the natives of this world of international politics so easily made their way through these social trenches. I did not have their easy ice-breaking phrases with which to engage people I’d never before met. At the first reception for delegates, where I’d found the luxury of the chamber dazzling and distracting, I knew no one. I didn’t have the moxie to stride-up boldly to a world leader with outstretched hand, so I cast my eyes around hoping they might land on someone who was as stranded as I. Soon an attractive and expensively dressed couple engaged me as if I were a lifelong friend. They turned out to be minor European royalty, and they knew how to do this. Not for the first time, I regretted that I had not forced myself to acquire the art of small talk. It would have helped me glide more gracefully around New York society, and it certainly would have made it easier for me in Prague. There were so many luminaries there and I had easy access to all of them. But none of them had ever heard of me and, despite my star billing, I had not given the attention-grabbing performance that might have put me on their radar. Had I had more experience in performing in public for Greenpeace, I might have been able to do better at Forum 2000. Instead I was disappointed in myself, and that unnerved me. It is not easy to be assured when you are the object of the kind of open contempt exhibited by the men who had escorted me from the airport. In my head, I was a second-class attendee, riding around the Forum in that battered little Skoda, and it affected the way I conducted myself. I did not exude the authority or the bearing that said, I am the Board Chair of Greenpeace International, and so no one of any importance approached me or showed any interest in the organisation I represented. Shimon Peres, Israel’s Minister for Foreign Affairs (and, of course, sometime Prime Minister and future President), swept past me several times, surrounded by a clutch of bodyguards. His room was in the same corridor as mine in the grim concrete bunker that was our hotel. He always nodded and gave a slight smile; he certainly did not emanate the incipient hostility I felt from other men at the Forum, but I could not find the words to greet him.
The Forum provided my first encounter with political leaders as peers—all invitees were supposedly of equal status. I had met plenty of political leaders before, of course, but this was not the same as sitting across from Caspar Weinberger, my reporter’s notebook at the ready, or interviewing the President of Argentina. I had nothing these men wanted—I wasn’t a reporter; or an influential thought-leader; not even, given my age, a potential roll in the hay—so mostly they simply ignored me. In this setting women were mostly inconsequential, unless they happened to be very famous or very powerful, and I found this invisibility difficult. Although Greenpeace was often portrayed as male-dominated, a perception fed by our action teams being mainly men, the culture of the organisation was far from hostile. We knew we needed more women in senior management roles, but a woman invariably led the board, which itself managed to achieve gender and geographical diversity. And, interestingly enough, it was women who had done the work to open each of our non-European offices. Apart from Anne Dingwall’s efforts in Russia, Hong Kong and Manaus, Lyn Goldsworthy had opened India and Southeast Asia while, earlier, Tani Adams had opened the three Latin American offices. I was treated with courtesy and respect wherever I went in the organisation, even in countries that traditionally were unaccustomed to women in leadership roles. This sheer rudeness in Prague was a shock and I found myself internalising the contempt.
Maybe it would have been easier if I’d been there as a journalist. The reporter’s notebook would have given me cover—and access. I knew I could have written a powerful article about this extraordinary gathering. Here were world leaders and other influential people who were among the first to try to articulate what the September 11 attacks meant for democracy and human rights. The sessions were all open to local media, and transcripts of all the proceedings were on the Forum 2000 website for many years (sadly, those for 2001 were taken down in October 2016), but as far as I could tell, there was no international media coverage. The press tends to cover only people who are currently in power, not those who might be influencing, or even determining, events from other positions and perspectives. Havel apparently no longer attracted US or even European media attention. I don’t know if I could have persuaded an editor to run my report on Forum 2000, but I would have liked to have been able to try.
I had finally achieved reconciliation with my father in 1988, the year of his death, and while this pleased my mother immensely, and brought me an unanticipated sense of peace, it turned out there was other unfinished business in our family that would not be resolved for another quarter century. During those years we had to deal with the shock of the deaths of my mother and my oldest brother David. Both deaths were sudden, and while my mother was 81, an age where death is not unexpected, she was healthy and fit so we were unprepared. She had died in her sleep, at home, in her own bed, in exactly the way she wanted to go. Once we got over the shock, my brothers and I were relieved that she had not suffered, she had not lost her faculties, nor had to endure the indignity of losing her drivers’ licence or having to go into a nursing home. We were sad of course, but our grief was tempered by the knowledge that she was finally at peace. One of my Greenpeace Board colleagues informed the Trustees of my bereavement, and I was immensely moved to receive letters of condolence, many of them intensely personal, from every one of the 27 Trustees, including some with whom I was in constant and not always amicable battle over governance matters. That they could set aside these squabbles to write such words of consolation demonstrated that while Greenpeace could be a tough and even ruthless organisation, it was also a family, and one with plenty of heart.
David’s death, in 2010, was different. He’d fallen from a ladder on his farm, struck his head on soft soil yet died instantly, in front of his wife Annie and second son Patrick. He was 63. Just a year earlier they had sold their house in Adelaide and, fulfilling a lifelong dream, moved to a property on Kangaroo Island, where he intended to build a house with his own hands. He and Annie were managing their first flock of sheep, and preparing to start on the house, when the terrible accident occurred. Less than three weeks earlier, my brothers and I had all gathered for something of a family reunion at David and Annie’s holiday house at Penneshaw, on the other side of Kangaroo Island. It was my first visit to this unique part of Australia, reached by a ferry that was an hour’s drive away from Adelaide. Our reunion was the result of a determined effort on the part of a family that rarely got together. We’d wanted to remember our mother and to acknowledge ourselves as a family of adult orphans who for all the little we had in common, were bound inextricably and permanently as siblings. We’d vowed to do it again, perhaps in a year’s time. Then came the phone call and we headed back to Kangaroo Island, our numbers augmented by our mother’s two surviving brothers and their wives, all in their eighties, a few of our cousins and Annie’s family. The service was in a tiny multi-faith picture-perfect church facing the water and later we stood by David’s grave, on a hillside overlooking his favourite fishing spot. There had been too many deaths in our family, I thought, as I watched David being lowered into the ground. We’d been six kids. Now we were four.
The year my father died was the same year that I became a business owner in New York, raised what seemed (then anyway) a huge amount of money on Wall Street; got a Green Card which gave me permanent residence in the United States; and become a well-known and, for a short time, sought-after person in the place where, according to the song, if you can make it there … I was unrecognisable as the sullen teenager who had stirred up so much anger in him. Nor was I any longer the ‘ratbag’ radical of the 1970s who enraged him. I’d met my parents once in Sydney, after I’d been to a political demonstration, and as I stomped across the grass in Hyde Park to our meeting point, I could see the disappointment—or was it disgust?—on their faces. Their only daughter—and look at her. Both he and my mother had had such conventional hopes for me, about the sort of person I might marry. They’d hoped for a doctor or a lawyer, someone whose status I would automatically assume. They had never expressed any ambition for me. My father had actually told me, while I was a teenager, that sending me to university would be a waste of money. Not that it cost him anything when I finally made it there, thanks to a Commonwealth Scholarship and the fact that I had totally supported myself since the age of fourteen. Now, both my parents were proud of me—of what I was doing and how I looked. I had my share of designer clothes, although many of them had been bought cheaply from Loehmann’s, their labels snipped off. My photograph was in the New York Times, in New York and Time magazines, and similar arbiters of achievement. I was under orders to send home copies of all such mentions, and my mother meticulously documented my life. After his death, I discovered that my father had fixed to the wall beside his bed a framed glam photo of me, taken in 1983 by Australian Vogue. This was the daughter of his dreams. Finally, he was pleased with the way I was. In July 1988, after Sandra and I had done the deal in New York, he’d written a letter telling me how proud he was of me. I flew to Adelaide for my brother Paul’s wedding on 20 August. My father looked wretched; he was gaunt and slow to move. Again, we did not talk. I did not even acknowledge that he had written to me. But back in Sydney, just before I returned to New York, from a friend’s house in Rozelle, sitting on the floor to be close to the telephone, I rang. Finally, we had the conversation that had been building up inside both of us for almost three decades. It was still hard. Neither of us was accustomed to expressing towards each other any feelings, except hostility. But we both knew this might be the last time we talked and perhaps it was easier that we could not see each other. He raised it first. He said he knew that we’d had ‘difficult periods’ in the past, and he got upset as he tried to say how sorry he was for the way he’d treated me. I listened with astonishment, and was so overcome with unfamiliar emotions that I barely knew how to respond. I kept saying, ‘It’s all right. I forgive you. I forgive you.’ And, in the end, sobbing, just before I hung up: ‘I love you.’
Back in New York I wrote to him. I told him how much I’d appreciated his letter and, especially the business advice he had given me. ‘It is pretty ironic, as I’m sure you appreciate’ I’d written, ‘that of all your kids I am the one to end up a capitalist.’ I assured him that the ‘difficulties’ we had had were ‘long forgotten’ and that he should not ‘harbour any feelings of remorse about that time’. Then, not knowing if I even believed what I was saying, I set out for him why I thought he should be proud of his life, of his family, of his accomplishments. I told him that he and I were more alike than we had ever wanted to acknowledge. I told him that as I wrote, I was listening to Kiri Te Kanawa singing Verdi: ‘My love of opera is something else I learned from you.’ I told him that I admired how he had finally been able to stop drinking, acknowledging how hard that must have been for him, and how glad I was that I’d been able to play a small part in helping it happen. ‘I would like to be able to help you now,’ I wrote, ‘as you deal with a difficult and painful illness.’ I told him he needed to accept that he was sick: ‘As you have shown in the past, you have the strength and character to deal with it’. I folded the four sheets of heavy cream paper and placed them in the matching envelope, with its maroon-coloured tissue lining. I addressed the envelope, using the same Montblanc fountain pen with my signature brown ink that I’d used for the letter and stamping it Air Mail, sent it on its way. It arrived the day after he died.
He was alone, in the Repat Hospital in Adelaide on 20 September 1988, when he succumbed. My mother had left just an hour or so before. She’d recounted in her diary later that day, ‘because of his drowsiness I probably wouldn’t get to say all the things to him that I wanted to.’ She’d been on the phone to her sister Gwen and when she hung up, it rang again immediately. It was the hospital ‘telling me my darling had died just fifteen minutes before’. When my letter arrived, my mother was overcome with happiness that her husband and her daughter had finally reconciled. She determined the moment should survive so she scrawled in capital letters on the envelope: ‘VIP. NEVER TO BE DESTROYED.’ Seventeen years later, after her own death, I found it among her papers.
In New York the night my father died, I’d been touched by the immense practical kindness shown by Joanne Edgar, one of the senior editors and a member of the original Ms. team. She immediately got on the phone to Qantas and organised a ticket for the next day. The problem was that I had submitted a Green Card application. If you left the country during the application process, you were deemed to no longer want to proceed. With my immigration lawyer, I headed for the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) early the next morning and, after the inevitable wait, told the officer that I was seeking a temporary parole so I could return to Australia.
‘Not possible.’
‘My father just died. I want to go to his funeral.’
‘Everyone says that,’ he told me.
Thank goodness for new technology. My brother Greg faxed me a copy of the death certificate, the only proof INS would accept. I made it back to Adelaide with just hours to spare, arriving at St Ignatius Church in Norwood where I’d been to Mass as a teenager, where in 1976 seven Jesuit priests presided at Jamie’s Requiem Mass and where, in 2005, we would celebrate the life of my mother, with the consoling sound of Gounod’s Ave Maria soaring towards the vaulted ceilings of this suburban church. My father’s was a far more modest service, with nothing like the 600 who’d attended Jamie’s funeral, just a few people he’d worked with, a couple of AA mates and other friends, together with members of both his and my mother’s families, but my father would have been tickled pink to know that among the small number of floral tributes laid beside his coffin was one from Gloria Steinem.
In July 2005, just a few weeks after we’d buried my mother, I joined the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland to set sail for Mataui Bay, an idyllic spot with clear turquoise waters near the tip of the north island of New Zealand. It was the resting place of the first Rainbow Warrior, which had been scuttled there in December 1987, two years after she had been sunk in Auckland Harbour in an act of terrorism by the French government. Although I had now been with Greenpeace for six years and had been on board most of our ships, I had never actually sailed with one. Finally, although it was just for one night, I was on our iconic flagship. We were not sailing into any kind of confrontation; the only risk on this voyage was seasickness. I had followed the onboard doctor’s advice, and was very glad I’d taken the pills when I saw the Japanese students who were travelling with us green faced and retching, because they had decided to tough it out. I felt honoured to be on board this boat because of what we were about to do, and because I finally felt joined to the history of this remarkable organisation.
The next morning we dropped anchor above the scuttled ship. It was 10 July, twenty years to the day since the bombing. Several of our divers went down to inspect the hull while we on board made preparations for the formal commemorative ceremony. We would be honouring both the ship and its decades of service to the cause of world peace and environmental integrity, but also the memory of Fernando Pereira, the young photographer who had been killed in the explosion. His daughter was with us as we threw flowers into the water. She had been eight-years-old when the French government murdered her father. It was still hard to believe a government had done such a thing, that it had attacked a non-government organisation whose mission had merely been to try to secure a more peaceful planet. I would still not call myself a pacifist because there are times when force is needed but I recoiled from any kind of violence. Whether it was dispensed by soldiers on behalf of governments, by individuals pursuing their demented fantasies, or men against members of their own families, I felt sickened with apprehension and fear whenever I contemplated the scale and intensity of the wanton violence that seems endemic in our world and which engulfs so many of us. Even my own family.
On an overcast day in October 2014, in a far corner of the Catholic section of Adelaide’s West Terrace Cemetery, my family gathered in front of the unmarked grave that for 79 years had held the remains of our grandfather, John Patrick Cooper. We were there for a final act of reconciliation.
When my father’s father died suddenly aged 51 in 1935, his wife and sons bought him a hole in the ground, but that was all. No headstone, no marker of any kind. Not even his name was recorded. He had lain unlamented in the ground ever since. Nor, until my brother Greg Cooper decided in 1988 to search for his grave, had anyone visited him. Greg had been shocked to discover the plot was full of weeds, and that a tree was growing up through it. Now, all these years later, his five surviving grandchildren—my three brothers, Tony, Greg and Paul, my cousin Pam Kelly, and I—had decided to give him a headstone.
My father never spoke about his father. As we were growing up we knew practically nothing about him, apart from a few fragments of family legend. He’d been a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front during World War I, my mother had told us. He was the only survivor when the four men carrying a loaded stretcher across No Man’s Land had stepped on a land mine. We were given to understand he was a violent man, but we were told no details. And we never asked. It was only as they approached their own deaths—my father in 1988 and his brother Arthur in 1997—that they started to open up to their children about the brutality of their upbringing. My father visited Greg at his home one night early in 1988, when his wife and kids were out, and spoke for hours about the horrors of his childhood.
There were stories of smashed toys and holes in walls.
My cousin Pam Kelly also had a conversation with her father Arthur as he lay close to death, and learnt that in 1928 our grandfather had put him, then aged seven, in hospital with a broken arm and jaw, injuries so severe the medical staff refused to believe that a father could have inflicted them.
There are no records of any of this beyond our fathers’ late-in-life disclosures. We have tried to find more, but while official records have yielded details of his work as a clerk for the tramways, and that he played the banjo in a small band that entertained prison inmates and performed at weddings, there is nothing that tells us what kind of man he was. We will never know how much the brutal experience of the trenches contributed to the way our grandfather was. We know war has a brutalising effect, and that his generation of returned soldiers often made their families bear the brunt of how the war had changed them. That was what had happened to our fathers. We grew up living with what World War II did to them with their ‘surly moods and intermittent brutalities’, as George Johnston put it in My Brother Jack, his brilliant novel about young men of our fathers’ generation. We had not, until now, really confronted what World War I had done to their fathers, and how that had shaped them as well.
Richard Flanagan begins The Narrow Road to the Deep North, his powerful novel that won the 2014 Man Booker Prize, with a scene about the impact of those who returned from the First War on the men who went to the Second. Flanagan’s central character is Dorrigo Evans, who endures the murderous conditions of the Japanese forced-labour camps. As a young boy Dorrigo had watched, astonished, when his older brother Tom returned from France: ‘He had swung his kitbag onto the hot dust of the siding and abruptly burst into tears.’ In 1918, men did not cry. It was so rare that it was frightening: ‘It was a sound like something breaking.’
Thousands of Australian families have lived for almost a century with the consequences of that breaking. John Cooper was 32 when he enlisted and his wife, our beloved Nana, tried to leave him then but was forced back to the marriage by her own father. This suggests he may already have been a violent man. We know he hit his wife so hard, she fell backwards against a door and knocked it off its hinges. We can speculate that his elder son’s relationships with his own children may have been affected by the cruelty of his childhood. We do know that he, his mother and brother wanted nothing to do with his memory once he was gone. Over the years, both sons accumulated enough money to buy their father a headstone. They chose not to. They buried their mother in another cemetery altogether, many kilometres away from her husband, with a handsome headstone that, inexplicably to us grandkids, mentioned her ‘loving husband’.
I’d written some of this in The Lost Mother in 2009 and it had prompted Patricia Smith, a woman in her 80s, the daughter of a World War I soldier, to contact me. She had visited France, she told me, and ‘wept in countless graveyards and read the inscriptions on headstones, and the thousands of those whose names were not known and read down the lists of those who have no known burial place’.
‘You do know where your grandfather is buried,’ she wrote, ‘It is too late for forgiveness, but bring him “home”, give him a name and a defined resting place and hope that his story shows the young in the family the utter futility of war.’
I showed the letter to my brothers and my cousin. Greg and Tony reminded me that they had initially talked about placing some kind of marker on the grave when Greg had first found it, back in 1988. Smith’s email gave that idea a new impetus. We were also influenced by Rosie Batty. After her son Luke was murdered at cricket practice in a small Victorian town by his father earlier that year, she had spoken of the need for families to talk about the violence so many of us harbour. We decided we would give our grandfather a headstone.
We talked a lot about what it would mean to do this. Were we forgiving him his violence? One brother was sentimental in that he just wanted to complete our family. Another felt we should respect the inaction of Nana and her two sons: the violence must have been pretty bad for them to have done this, was his thinking. I was insistent that our action not be seen as condoning this man’s behaviour. Then there was the question of what should be written on the headstone. We concluded that it was not for us to countermand the decision of Nana and her sons by now including their names. We did eventually agree that his war service should be acknowledged. He was the only member of our family to serve in World War I (Mum’s father, a good Melbourne Irish Catholic, had obeyed Archbishop Mannix’s stricture about not getting involved in what he saw as primarily a British war). Greg obtained permission from the War Graves Commission to use the AIF emblem. The headstone we erected on the dismal patch of ground that had been his resting place for so long listed his name, and gave his dates of birth and death. ‘Served in WWI on the Western Front,’ it read. ‘Remembered by his grandchildren Anne, Pam, David, Tony, Greg & Paul.’ Greg had checked with David’s widow, Annie, about including his name as we were sure that David would have wanted to be part of this.
Joining Pam, my cousin, and her husband Steve, and my brothers and me at the graveside that day was Greg’s older son Matthew, Tony’s son Jake and Paul’s older son Richard, as well as David’s daughter-in-law Linda and her three children, Jasmine, Josh and Chelsea. Three generations of Coopers confronting our grandfather’s violence, the younger ones listening as we, the grandchildren, made clear that while we were bringing him ‘home’, we condemned the way he had treated his wife and children. We understand more these days about the ongoing trauma inflicted on those who go to war—how it damages people, often permanently (especially if left unacknowledged)—but we have talked less about the lethal impact on their families and the cycle of violence it perpetuates across generations. My family hoped that by acknowledging the person while repudiating his behaviour, we might help start to break these cycles, so men can learn to deal differently with buried pain and raging emotions. I was grateful that my brothers were the kind of men who could talk about these things. I hoped the cycle of violence in our family was now spent. As it needs to be in so many other families. Looking around that unkempt corner of the cemetery, at the plots up and down the rows where our grandfather now lay acknowledged, it was chilling to see just how many unmarked graves there were.