Sixth day - 25 June
Diary of a climate-action tour of (mostly) eastern Australia
All our tents had a crisp skin of frost across their faces when we woke in the creekside campground of Pillaga Pottery. The family that runs the bush retreat-ceramics studio-farm had welcomed us into their warm mud-brick dining room the night before after we set up our camp. We’d arrived at dusk after a day’s drive, the last leg of the journey along smooth, fine-sand roads through seemingly endless, sheltering woodland.
It was the first night that 83-year-old June Norman joined our tour. She also met up with an old friend at Pillaga Pottery, something of a low-key place of connection for people who’ve been part of the long campaign against Santos’ Narrabri-Pillaga coal seam gas project. June was arrested in the Pillaga in 2016 when she participated in protests as a Climate Guardian Angel. In photos from the time, she’s dressed in a long white gown, her shining white hair glowing like a halo around her face, while two police officers awkwardly remove her colourful prosthetic wings so they can get her into a police vehicle.
On the bus from Pillaga to Hay (after shaking the ice off our tents and filling up on hot porridge), June showed me photos from two decades of activism on the iPad she’s brought on the tour. Her first arrest was in 2005, when she objected to the Talisman Sabre military exercises being called “war games”. She had seen the effects of war on women and children when she’d volunteered to work as a teacher in Timor Leste, where she has an extended adopted family she still visits regularly.
June hasn’t really stopped since then, except when family members have needed her. During these years, she’s been arrested six times. She’s been active in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, walked 1,700 kilometres from London to Geneva with Footprints for Peace and was a Climate Guardian Angel at the Paris COP in 2015. June was also an Angel at the 2017 Rising Tide actions at the Newcastle coal port.
I asked her what made her decide to come on this Rising Tide tour.
“I’m here to inspire and encourage older people to stand up and be counted,” she replied, going on to explain she fees she owes it to younger generations to act. It’s not just because she’s a grandmother and a great-grandmother, but because she sees that current generations of young people face so many challenges: work, study, the cost of living and the uncertain future of a world in climate chaos.
“It’s our generation, with their apathy and “‘everything’s alright’” that’s responsible for letting this all happen,” says June, with a radiant smile and an angelic twinkle in her eye, “and I’ve never had so much fun!”.
Thanks Mina.