Daintree Protest Book

In late 1983, a small group of local residents organised a protest to stop work on a road being built from Cape Tribulation to Bloomfield.  The local Council, in defiance of the parks authorities and the state government agency in charge of roads, decided to bulldoze a track through.  Council's preparatory surveying and engineering work was slipshod and amateurish.  Even Russ Hinze, then the Minister for Main Roads and a man not known for his conservationist credentials, was appalled.  The protest brought a stop to construction, the media arrived, the police were called in and protesters were arrested.  When supporters of the protest arrived from southern states, the confrontation escalated into a full-blown environmental protest; The Daintree Blockade.  The blockade set off a clash of ideologies; Greenies against developers, hippies against the local Council and anarchists against police.  The blockade failed - the road went through and the short term impact on the environment was as dire as expected.  Run-off from the road affected the Great Barrier Reef and the integrity of a unique wilderness site was damaged.  In Council's haste to push it through, that first road was so poorly constructed that the first celebratory motorcade to travel on it became hopelessly bogged and had to be painstakingly towed to safety, one by one.  In time, the Daintree blockade would take its place as one of the big three early rainforest campaigns that helped shape the growing Australian environment movement.  Bill Wilkie takes readers into the heart of the Daintree, the oldest rainforest on the planet, revealing the courage, passion and dedication of those who fought to protect it.  This new book features 344 pages, more than 250 photographs and a foreword by actor Jack Thompson.  The Daintree Blockade is based on over 80 interviews with key protagonists and intensive archival research.  In the end, the world's attention had been drawn to the unique Daintree ecosystem and the result was World Heritage listing, a tourism boom and growing economic prosperity for the region.  Wilkie's important book reminds us all that these outcomes were never inevitable and should never be taken for granted.  I spent a little time on the earlier Windsor Tableland Picket in 1981 on the western side of the Daintree which gives me a personal interest in this story.  It was a surprise to me to learn that this is the first book to be written about the protest and it has now won the 2017 Queensland Premier's literary award for a Work of State Significance.