by Anne Summers
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 e
xpected 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.