Meet The Inspiring Women Fighting For Our Future
Some women are perpetually active. They continually take on new causes and step up to advocate for change day after day. Whether handing out supplies at a food bank or holding a placard at a climate rally, these women advocates are the drivers of their own destiny.
In contrast, other women’s journeys to advocacy are long winding, meandering paths, full of twists and turns and doubt and anxiety. For some, their advocacy will arise from a single experience. One moment, which will change the course of their lives. This was Jane Bremmer’s experience, a new mother unwillingly thrown into her new life as an environmental justice advocate the day her husband developed a rash after digging in their new garden.
“It was like the universe was sending us a message,” she said. Unbeknown to them, their first home was across the road from a toxic waste dump site. Despite decades of chemical leaching and clouds of dense black toxic smoke appearing across the neighborhood, Western Australia still had no laws to manage or clean up toxic waste. Instead, it sat there, hidden behind a high wooden fence.
It was an outrageous injustice. Since that day their garden became a toxic hazard, Jane’s volunteer advocacy as an environmental justice campaigner has forced companies and governments to undertake toxic clean-ups. Jane and her fellow advocates have secured new laws managing toxic waste while creating a community of environmental justice advocates in towns and communities across Australia.
During this time she was also fighting to save her family home. But that was a losing battle. With the lead levels in their soil and ceiling deemed too high, four years after that fateful day, they had to leave. Six months later [February 2001], the toxic waste drums across from the property exploded. The Bellevue explosion in quiet, suburban Perth became one of Australia’s best known toxic waste disasters.
Jane’s unplanned life as an environmental advocate has been supported by women’s power. “Like many environmental justice disputes, I often find that the interest and support first and foremost comes from women, and first and foremost from mothers. They are this very powerful sector of our society who get it straight away,” she said.
One woman who trod the winding path towards environmental advocacy was June Norman. June didn’t plan to be an advocate, nor was she raised to believe women had much power. But by the time she hit her 60s her views were slowly changing. A divorce followed by a stint volunteering in East Timor – where she learnt its history of violence, torture, extrajudicial killings, sexual slavery and massacres under Indonesian rule – opened her eyes.
“I just saw red,” she said. She took this anger and harnessed it into power. First she protested for peace.
She and 150 peace activists travelled to Shoalwater Bay in northern Queensland where Australian and US military were holding war games. They scaled a fence and carried 10 makeshift coffins covered with Christian and Muslim emblems to hold a memorial for the people who died in the Iraq war. This resulted in June’s first arrest.
She walked 1200 kilometres alongside the Great Barrier Reef in 2013 to highlight what we stand to lose from climate change and seek climate justice. She donned wings to become a “climate angel”, engaging in living art installations at proposed gas mines across eastern Australia. And she’s been given an award for her peace activism by the UN. “I don’t think they realised that the Australian government had arrested me for the very same activities!” she laughed.
Mikaela Jade’s journey was different yet again. Mikaela had always wanted to be involved with the environment. After volunteering for the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service she was offered a job at the young age of 21, navigating the ins and outs of the decline of the native dugong while helping to formulate a sustainable solution led by traditional owners. The solution they found was a world first: the first multi-clan Memorandum of Understanding ever reached with the EPA, written in the five traditional owners’ languages.
Innovation is Mikaela’s superpower. She longed for a better way to share Indigenous language and lore, to propel First Nation voices to the forefront of environmental management in Australia. Her idea of bringing digital augmented technology to Indigenous communities offered so many solutions to so many problems in one smooth brushstroke: sharing millennia of environmental and cultural knowledge, alleviating the weariness of traditional owners having to repeatedly tell their stories, and bringing remote communities into the digital age through digital sovereignty.
After years of learning coding at night after long days working as a ranger and caring for her family, her dream was realised with the launch of her company, Indigital. With a growing number of staff, outreach projects into schools around Australia, a partnership with Microsoft developing applications on its [mixed reality smartglasses] HoloLens, people can now see, hear and experience Indigenous stories in augmented reality created and owned by First Nations people. Meanwhile her journey as an advocate uncovered her own family history of Indigenous dispossession and trauma, and her sheer determination to turn her dream into a reality has garnered accolade after accolade.
Whether born from a long-standing deep love of the environment or a life changing moment of shock, these women are each in their own way stepping up to protect and preserve the environment before it is too late. They each exemplify different ways we can seek to improve our world. Their stories inspire and motivate, showing us it is women who are the engine of the environmental movement.
Co-Authors of The Advocates, Jill Ferguson (top) and Robyn Gulliver.
Out now: The Advocates: Women within the Australian Environmental Movement (Melbourne University Press) by Robyn Gulliver, an environmentalist, writer and researcher who advocates for and writes about environmental issues for activist groups, local councils, not-for-profit organisations and academia, and Jill L. Ferguson, a writer, editor, consultant, entrepreneur and artist.