Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian Greens Party, rose to national prominence over his campaign to stop a dam being built on the Franklin River in Tasmania in the early 1980s. He went on to form and lead the Greens Party in the Australian parliament. Robert James Brown was born on December 27, 1944 at Oberon, New South Wales, and was educated at Coffs Harbour High School, Blacktown High School, and the University of Sydney, where he gained his medical degree. In 1968–9 he worked at Canberra Hospital and then at Darwin and Alice Springs Hospitals. He spent a year in hospitals in London, UK, and on returning to Australia became a general practitioner in Sydney and then Perth. In 1972 he was a doctor with the Shaw Savill Line Cruise Ships and then moved to Tasmania, where he worked as a general practitioner in Launceston until 1976. Brown remained in northern Tasmania as a doctor until 1980. A founding member of the Wilderness Society, he was the director of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society from 1979 until 1984 and was also a secretary of the Tasmanian Tiger Search Group. In the late 1970s plans were raised to dam the Franklin River, a largely untouched natural resource in Tasmania that was declared a World Heritage site in 1982. In a referendum on the state government's proposal to build the dam, the public was given the choice of which type of dam they wanted – and where it should ... log in or subscribe to read full text