Tell us a little about yourself
I currently volunteer at the Port Phillip University of Third Age where I do their newsletter and run a popular weekly film class. I've lived in Middle Park for over 50 years and I'm married with three adult children and four grandchildren now.
I've spent nearly two decades doing a range of community work including spearheading the building of a community playground, being an active member of climate action group LIVE and helping to create and support local climate action groups including the Port Phillip Emergency Climate Action Network (PECAN), and the Bayside Climate Crisis Action Group (BCCAG).
Before getting into climate action, I worked in a Bank in IT and supported the intranet.
What was the first community project you were involved in?
In my late 30's I would come home from work at the Bank and watch TV in the evenings. We had little kids at the time, aged 4 and 6. My wife insisted I had to do something useful in the evenings. So I got involved in the building of a community playground. When we started out, we didn't really know what it was going to be. It became a full-time evening job for the next three years.
It was 1990 and the South Melbourne Council as it was known then, were prepared to help us with the playground. They didn't want to build it, it had to be a community project. So I got the community group together. All of a sudden, I had 20 people together wanting to build a playground, I thought, this is going to be easy.
We used the same architect who built the Hampton Thomas Street playground. Robert Leathers and Associates from Ithaca in upstate New York who had built 800 playgrounds over the past 20 years, all through community projects. We wanted that style of playground.
In the end after three years, we had 3,500 volunteers contributing to the project and I'd raised $150,000 in cash grants. The playground ended up being built at Albert Park Lake in just five days and it's still there 30 years later.
How did you persevere through this time and not give up?
Some people do give up if it doesn't happen quickly. But I didn't, as I had made commitments to lots of people.
We got the project done through parents and grandparents of little kids. It was the parents' groups and mothers at local primary school who all got behind it and made it happen. Once it was built and I saw the kids playing on the playground, I thought this was all worth it. My grandkids still use the playground today.
How did you become involved in climate action work?
It was by chance really. In 2006 my wife was working at a school and she got some free tickets to a movie. The movie was 'An Inconvenient Truth', by Al Gore. So I went along to that. This was my first wake up call about climate change caused by CO2 heating the earth. It really influenced me in a big way. But what did I do about it? Nothing. There were no local groups involved in climate change at that time.
Then the next year something happened. I turned 60 and I was made redundant where I worked. I was wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I started getting more involved in community work. My third child was involved in the Sea Scouts, so I started helping out with that.
There was a fete at my children's school and they asked parents if they wanted to have a stall. I agreed to have a stall and gave out information about Sea Scouts to attract people to join up.
At the stall next to mine, there was a mum who had two boys at the school. She was setting up a climate action group called LIVE. We got talking and she asked if I could build a website for LIVE. I had just left the bank and thought 'what am I going to do with my life?' So I thought yes, I can build websites for people. So I agreed to build the live.org.au website. In return, she agreed to bring her two boys along to Sea Scouts.
I then got involved in building other websites including websites for PECAN and BCCAG.
What inspired your climate activism?
It was the time when Kevin Rudd was in power and he had backed off on taking action on climate change. A friend suggested we do a human sign as a bit of a protest. So I thought, here's another project.
We had big ambitions; we wanted to do the biggest human sign ever! It turned out the biggest human sign was at the World Cup Final in Spain and there were 200,000 people, so we weren't going to get into the Guinness Book of Records!
Over 6 months I gathered the people that would be in this human sign on St Kilda beach. Local primary schools in the area got involved, there were about 15 schools altogether from Port Phillip to Bayside, Stonnington and Glen Eira.
For me that was three months full time organising the publicity material, keeping track of everything, reminding people it was happening, getting kids knowledgeable about what we were doing. I'd say to kids "You as a little kid of 7, are going to have an influence on the Prime Minister". That appeals to a lot of little kids. So that resulted in the human sign. It was huge, and it got great media coverage. It was featured on the Sunday night news on the major TV networks.
How did your community work evolve after the human sign?
Well in 2014 I started looking into solar panels. I worked with the community and developed a solar panel bulk buy through the EcoCentre. There was about 30 or 40 people that wanted in. I made a deal with a local Solar Panel company (Energy Matters) for a discounted price. I just walked in there off the street one day and asked to see the Managing Director. We went into a room and it was a done deal. Later we ended up doing a smaller second bulk buy.
What advice would you give people who want to run community groups?
You've got to have a passion, and through persistence somehow you will find a way. If you think it's going to be easy, someone else would be doing it. Say yes, a lot more often than no.
Ask yourself, what is a project that is possible? Who would work with you to achieve it? Anything worthwhile doing needs 5 or 10 people at least. You know you will lose some people along the way as soon as the going gets tough. And just get on and do it!
