Books

Ben Brooker
Defiance: Stories from Nature and Its Defenders

In north-western India in 1730, Amrita Devi and her three daughters were beheaded while attempting to protect a grove of Khejri trees from being felled on the orders of Abhai Singh, the Maharaja of Marwar, who wanted the wood for a new palace. In what became known as the Khejarli Massacre, hundreds of other Bishnois were killed before Singh, astounded by their peaceful resistance, called his men off and travelled to the village to apologise.

The shocking story of history’s first “tree-huggers” provides a fitting opening to conservationist and former Greens leader Bob Brown’s latest book, Defiance, in the form of a dedication to Devi and her daughters. Clearly, Devi’s sacrifice inspired Brown’s five decades of environmental activism – he has been arrested countless times preventing trees in Tasmania’s forests from being logged – but it also prefigures today’s struggles between “progress” and the planet.

As Brown writes of the 1980s campaign that became synonymous with wilderness protection in Australia: “We thought that saving the Franklin [River] would usher in a new age of environmental care. However, it also helped to spur a successful and ongoing effort by corporations to influence both sides of politics to legislate a whole range of punitive measures against environmental defenders.”

Successive Australian state and federal governments both left and right have legislated some of the most draconian anti-protest laws in the world. In April 2022, the New South Wales parliament introduced laws preventing “illegal protesting” on major infrastructure with offenders facing fines of $22,000, two years in jail, or both. In response to an Extinction Rebellion protest in Adelaide in May 2023, the Malinauskas Labor government rushed through changes to protest laws that have made the nebulous crime of “obstructing a public place” punishable by a $50,000 fine or three months’ imprisonment.

Despite this, Brown is sanguine about the prospects for nonviolent resistance in this country. While governments, encouraged by industry lobbyists and corporate backers, clamp down on activists, he sees “in the forests themselves, more people than ever [who are] committing to peacefully obstructing chainsaws and bulldozers”. This is not mere Pollyannaism. Surveys consistently show the environment is a top concern for young Australians. While many will express their disquiet at the ballot box, others will doubtless do so in front of the chainsaws.

Pieced together from diary entries, prison letters and short essays – some previously published, including in this newspaper – Defiance is neither a legacy-massaging political memoir nor a straightforward manual for nonviolent protest. Rather, it marries the personal and the political in ways that centre many stories other than Brown’s own. Those, for example, of Warren James, the first recorded forest activist to be jailed in Australia, and of Brenda Hean, the Lake Pedder campaigner who died in a suspicious plane crash in 1972.

In a book as personal as this, occasional sloppiness can be forgiven – quotes are sometimes misattributed, and Brown describes the idiosyncratic writings of a fellow conservationist as second person when he means third. Harder to overlook are the book’s polemical turns – News Corp stinks, we get it – which are less welcome than Brown’s heartfelt paeans to the people who have energised him both personally and professionally. There is, for example, a moving chapter on his mother, Marjorie May, who died in 1983, and many loving asides on his long-time partner, Paul Thomas, a farmer and activist.

Unsurprisingly, Brown is most effusive about the natural world. In a piece on wallaby hunting on the plains of Tasmania’s high Central Plateau, Brown’s customarily plain and direct writing adopts a convincing eco-poetic register. “If only,” he writes of the legislators responsible for designating this World Heritage area open for guns and dogs, “they could be here to taste this premium peace; to feel the Sun’s warmth taking the chill from the light southerly breeze; to see the white drifts of snow on the distant peaks, the luminescent green cushion plants and the flashes of red from the robins darting across the lea.”

Defiance arrives at an interesting time for two reasons. First, because the Greens, the party co-founded by Brown in 1992, dramatically underperformed in this year’s federal election, a result sheeted home by many to the abandonment of its environmentalist roots in favour of social issues and the genocide in Gaza. But as this lucid and companionable book shows, Brown’s vision – still deeply entrenched in the party’s philosophy – was always more broadly concerned with justice and its obstacles.

The second reason is that its publication coincides with Labor’s announcing of a new climate target for 2035, namely a carbon emissions cut of between 62 and 70 per cent from 2005 levels. That target – roundly condemned as inadequate by many on the environmentalist left – itself comes as a landmark report, Australia’s first National Climate Risk Assessment, paints a disturbing picture of a near-future Australia ravaged by climate shocks. Brown notes that ending native forest logging would be the quickest and cheapest way for Labor to meet its emissions reduction targets, however unambitious they have since proved to be.

As Brown himself writes, Defiance is “easy to read, not easy to heed”. The kind of courage lionised and seemingly effortlessly exhibited by Brown is in short supply within the corridors of power these days. We’re going to need many more Amrita Devis if our children’s children are to inherit a natural world as wondrous as the one that formed so determined and compassionate a defender as Bob Brown.

Black Inc, 320pp, $36.99
Black Inc is a Schwartz company

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 4, 2025 as "Defiance: Stories from Nature and Its Defenders".

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