Do it for your grandkids

Image via www.bobbrown.org.au

Seasoned eco-warrior and politician that he is, Australian Greens founder and former leader Bob Brown knew that he was playing to a warmly supportive home crowd when he opened the three-day Perth Writers Festival at the University of Western Australia’s Octagon Theatre last night (Thursday 19 February 2015), delivering a relaxed song and dance act, quite literally.

For those who never knew Brown was a handy pianist, his keyboard rendering onstage of his own composition Earth Song was a pleasant revelation. He added to this, sundry other audio-visual supports, from video clips on his beloved and still threatened Tarkine wilderness in Tasmania to a full recording of Earth Song.

It was clear that Brown is relishing what he himself referred to as ‘the fruits of retirement’ since his resignation as leader of the Greens and stepping down from his long-held Senate seat in 2012 – a return to campaigning, getting into the wilderness, writing, and just plain fooling around. One of those fruits has been his first book (more to come, he tells us), Optimism: Reflections on a Life of Action (2014), which he discreetly omitted to spruik during last night’s address (but he can be heard again on Optimism at 4pm WST today, Friday 20 February, at another Perth Writers Festival session in the Octagon Theatre).

Though somewhat meandering in style, his was a passionate address, centred on a simple message: ‘Until we vote for our grandchildren, we’ll vote wrong.’ His pitch was unambiguous: we are an ‘unusual mammalian herd that has decided to take over the planet’, but, he warned us, this could be the only planet available that has life, intellect and awareness. Even if we simply maintain carbon dioxide levels as they are now, sea levels are set to rise massively. We have voted in a government that is now busily reversing the very little we were doing about this catastrophe. And now, instead of charging polluters, we are giving them billions just to see if they will reduce their emissions.

Brown is an undoubted optimist and positive thinker. He told moving human stories to illustrate his point that ‘Even in the darkest of lives, there shines an opportunity.’ Nevertheless, the delicate tension between this life view of his and his references last night to ‘a climate change cataclysm which is accelerating now’ is apparent, and schizoid.

His final advice was for the audience to consider the question: ‘Will our grandkids like us? Will they ask us, “What did you do?”’