Coming in from the wilderness

For much of that time, too, it has almost been as if there were two Bob Browns: the conviction politician, for whom compromise seemed to be a dirty word; and the private person, whose generosity and compassion seemed boundless, especially to those who experienced it first hand.

Jonathan Ledgard is African correspondent for The Economist magazine, but he is also a novelist who accepted a fellowship from the Tasmanian Writers Centre inHobart last year to write his second novel. During this time, he became increasingly concerned about the fate ofQueensland photographer Nigel Brennan and Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout, who had been kidnapped inSomalia.

''I felt bad for him and for Amanda and I knew from being inNairobi and from my Somali and spy contacts there that they had been forgotten and that there was a potential they could be executed,'' Ledgard told The Age. ''So I took myself down to see Bob at his office by the harbour inHobart.

''It seemed a world away. I simply told Bob that there was an Australian in trouble, that as far as I could see he had been abandoned, that this was who he was, this was the threat to his life, and that Bob should have a word with the Foreign Minister. And of course Bob did so much more; he's a special man.''

What Brown did was mobilise a private effort to raise the ransom to secure Brennan's freedom. Not only did he contact Dick Smith, who contributed the lion's share of the ransom, he took out a personal loan of $100,000 that helped secure Brennan's release last November. The loan has never been made public. Paul Thomas mentioned it during an interview over dinner with Brown last week to draw a distinction between the public and private causes of his partner of 15 years.

At the same time Brown was asking his bankers for $100,000 to help Brennan, he was appealing to his own supporters to pay a $240,000 legal bill arising from an unsuccessful court action against Forestry Tasmania.

''The forests campaign is a political campaign and is something Bob's advocated all of his political life, so it was appropriate for him to lead the court case to stop logging of theWielangtaForest and all that encompassed,'' Thomas explained. ''It is quite different to the Nigel Brennan case, which was very much a personal thing.''

Had Brown been unable to raise the $240,000, he could have been declared bankrupt and had to forfeit his Senate seat. The money was raised in a couple of days, with donations from more than 1000 people ranging from $7.20 to $20,000. As for the Brennan matter, the photographer insisted that he repay Brown in full after he and Lindhout were freed last November. Brown refused, but finally accepted half the money.

''He said he felt guilty for having gone there, but he shouldn't have,'' Brown says. ''They wanted to go and see this hellhole of 1.2 million refugees inSomalia living in appalling conditions. I said don't apologise to me. Anyone who is driven by whatever reason to shine a light into a dark hole like that in the profession of the fourth estate deserves our total admiration.''

Dick Smith, who made his fortune as an electronics retailer, says many people believe he intervened in the Brennan case after an approach from the family. ''It was Bob Brown who contacted me and gave me some basic details and asked if I'd mind speaking to Nigel's father. And I said, 'Why don't you contact some of the billionaires?' and he said he'd contacted them all and no one would give a cent.''

Three years earlier, Smith had taken a call from Brown that led him to contribute about $1.7 million to the purchase ofRechercheBay inTasmania and save the historic coastal area from logging. ''If Bob Brown calls me, I know it's going to be expensive,'' Smith now says. ''I think he's a person with compassion and common sense, but he's probably about 30 years before his time.''

'THERE you go'' is a phrase Brown tends to use often, as if the intricacies of politics and life remain a fascination to him, rather than a burden to be carried. He used it on Wednesday night last week when he began an address to a rally about saving native forests with the breaking news of the move against Rudd. ''That's for the Labor Party to sort out, but there you go,'' he said.

The ability to be unsurprised by life's twists and turns is something Brown inherited from his father, Jack, along with a disdain for pomposity. Jack Brown was a country copper in NSW and Brown still recalls the time he stormed home, enraged that a judge had refused to hear evidence from a witness who was not wearing a coat.

''So he took a coat out of the cupboard and took it to court so this bigwig judge could hear the man's testimony,'' says Brown. ''Another time he pulled someone up for something or other and they said they were one of the church leaders from the city. He said that was very interesting, and gave him the ticket anyway.''

Brown says his father taught him the value of honesty and directness. The concern for the environment came from his mother, Marjorie, who was brought up on a dairy farm. And the drive to speak out in support of oppressed minorities? That is in part a product of Brown's own journey as a gay man, a journey that he says makes it easy for him to relate to people who have been repressed because of who they are, wherever they might be, including the Uighurs inChina. ''Of course, it's just human decency that says they should be looked after. But maybe it [my experience] helps me to not tread softly on the pedal.''

Brown's early struggle to come to terms with his identity is well-canvassed in two early biographies. In Bob Brown of the Franklin, Peter Thompson wrote that the idea of suicide was a constant companion in early childhood and during his residency atCanberraHospital. In Bob Brown: Gentle Revolutionary, James Norman wrote that, during his medical studies inSydney, Brown attempted to escape his ''private hell'' by subjecting himself to early trials of a radical treatment called aversion therapy.

''Within weeks I was sitting in a chair, while my reaction to photos of nudes projected onto a screen was measured,'' Brown toldNorman. ''My hands were wired to an electric shock machine. Each male on the screen was followed by a shock. The occasional female was followed by the relief of no shock at all … Inside I was dying away.''

Around this time, too, Brown set out to join the Liberals, the party both his parents supported, but arrived just after itsSydney headquarters closed and didn't try again.

Sitting at a restaurant in theCanberra suburb ofGriffith, Brown is matter-of-fact as he recalls the period: ''I was just a very bewildered and young student who wanted the world to be sorted out and very neat and clean and tidy. It took a long time to accept that it ain't like that.''

The first big turning point in Brown's life came when he arrived inTasmania in May 1972 for a six-week stint as a locum GP. His interest in the state had been stoked by aFour Corners documentary on the flooding ofLakePedder and by the search for the Tasmanian tiger. A few days later, he wrote a postcard to his parents that said: ''Dear Mum and Dad, I am home.''

One of the first things he did was fly overLakePedder, just before it was flooded, and make contact with ''theLakePedder people'' who were campaigning aroundTasmania in a caravan and in the process of setting up a new political party, the United Tasmania Group.

''They had a manifesto and it wasn't just environmentalism. It was indigenous rights, women's rights, agriculture and education - everything I'd been thinking about,'' says Brown. ''Here was a party that had a comprehensively different set of thinking, with an ecological construct. I was home again.''

Four years later, Brown was stopped in the street by a forester named Paul Smith who invited him on a trip down theFranklinRiver. Apparently others had been asked and declined: the river was too remote and too dangerous. Brown replied that he would happily come along, provided Smith agreed to a bushwalk of his choice in the mountains, but as the adventure approached he began to worry.

His concern was that talk would inevitably turn to personal matters when the two were sitting by the campfire and, to avoid a potentially embarrassing moment, he told Smith what had been his secret. He was gay. ''He just laughed,'' Brown recalls. ''It made no difference at all.'' The trip was the making of Brown as a political campaigner, but it also prompted his decision to announce his sexuality to the world.

''After that trip he put a little bit of pressure on me. He said you shouldn't just stay quiet about this.'' Soon after, he agreed to participate in anABC documentary on homosexuality, a program that was followed up in the Launceston Examiner under the headline, ''Doctor says he's gay''. Brown says he hadn't realised at first that theABC program would be shown nationally so, after visiting his neighbours, who were bemused by the news, he flew up to NSW to tell the family, who were ''all very good about it''.

Even so, his decision to be open about his sexuality was used against him by those opposing his campaign to protect the wilderness and, in his words, he was subjected to ''every form of vilification that you can think of''.

In the years before and after he led the campaign to save theFranklin, Brown would also be bashed, jailed and shot at. He would also earn the unflinching regard of novelist Richard Flanagan, who says: ''I wouldn't be a writer if it wasn't for him. He's a genuinely good man.''

At the height of theFranklin battle, Flanagan wrote what was to be his first book, a history of theGordonRiver country in south-westTasmania. It included a chapter critical of the Wilderness Society, the body Brown had helped set up in 1976. ''I just felt that they hadn't appreciated that working-class people had a profound experience with the wilderness and, instead of dismissing it, they ought to listen to it as well,'' Flanagan explains.

The book was accepted for publication but Flanagan was told the publishers wanted to cut out the chapter critical of the Wilderness Society because it might offend the book's potential middle-class market in Sydney and Melbourne. ''In the end I decided that, as much as I wanted to be a writer, I wasn't going to publish a book with its heart ripped out. I bumped into Bob and he asked what I was up to. At the time he was the Gandhi of the rivers, and he said it [the censorship] was terrible. He offered to write to the publishers and suggest that he write the foreword as long as the chapter stayed in. That's what happened and I became a writer.''

Flanagan rejects the depiction of Brown as an uncompromising zealot, describing him instead as a builder. ''It's a great shame he will never be a minister in a government, because he would make things. He created out of the defeat ofLakePedder the Wilderness Society, then he created the Tasmanian Greens, then he created the Australian Greens. None of these were givens.''

Brown credits his success in the Senate to Thomas, the man he met when he was considering making his run in 1995. ''That bought Paul into my life and I wouldn't be in the Senate now without him. Full stop. We've got a great friendship, a great companionship and he's a wonderful complement to my life. I know myself well enough to know no Paul, no me in the Senate. That's how it is.''

They share a house in the hills, 50 minutes' drive fromHobart, that is a haven for the endangered Swift parrot, and also regularly retreat to Liffey in north-centralTasmania, where Brown bought a small house for $8000 in 1973. Stencilled into the gate are the words: ''Trespassers welcome. No guns.'' Brown is making plans for Liffey, which backs onto a World Heritage area, to become a public reserve but says he is not yet thinking about life after politics.

''I haven't appointed or anointed a successor, nor would I. I think that is one of the things about leadership - to establish a situation where you obviously have leadership material in the party and leave it to them to sort out.''

Thomas, 54, a fifth-generation Tasmanian with a background in farming, says they will both know when it is time for Brown to retire. ''Whilst Bob's fit and able and enjoying what he's doing, he might as well keep doing it. When he gets jaded and when it comes time to give him a nudge and say, 'Your time's up, Bob', I'll certainly tell him that, but he's clearly enjoying it and there's still a lot of work to be done.''

Flanagan is convincedAustralia is entering a new phase in politics that is more fluid and dynamic than what has gone before. Brown agrees, and insists the Greens will work constructively with whoever wins the election to achieve good results and advance an agenda that includes introducing a carbon tax, better funding for mental health, a national dental scheme and a permanent solution for forest protection. Brown says he has worked with Julia Gillard on industrial relations and youth issues and found her ''matter-of-fact, plain-speaking and does what she says she will do'', but he isn't expecting too much to change.

''Everybody with a progressive bone in their body raised a glass at the news of our first female prime minister, but that's where that ends,'' he says. ''Politically it doesn't change the dynamic at all. There's no way that we're going to get a green Gillard government any more than a green Rudd government or a green Howard government. That's why we're here.''