Australian Story: Aug 4

Monday’s Australian Story profiles Drew Hutton, a senior activist who has united farmers and greenies and rallied people power against coal seam gas – but at a very high personal cost.

This week’s Australian Story features an ‘ageing’ activist who admits he’s spent the best part of fifty years tilting at windmills without a lot to show for it until now.

Drew Hutton seems as surprised as anyone that suddenly, nearing seventy, he’s become the mastermind of a big and effective people power campaign against coal seam gas.

And he’s done it by uniting former sworn enemies – farmers and greenies.

But as Australian Story reveals this late life renaissance has come at a high cost to his health and his personal life.

From his earliest days attending Brisbane Boys Grammar during the 1960s, Drew Hutton recalls being driven by a strong personal code of right and wrong. His mother Margery remembers him sticking up for anyone who was being bullied. ‘We could see he had principles and lived by them’, she says.

A gifted athlete and the school captain, Drew Hutton graduated ready to take on the world. Friend and former teacher Alan Jones says he expected him to go to university and then head to the corporate world and make big money.

But instead Drew Hutton took a radical turn to the left.

He stood for the Greens multiple times, contested local government elections and ran for the federal senate. But he was never elected. Watching from afar Alan Jones despaired: ‘I felt that while his idealism was laudable I thought there was a political naivety about it,’ he says.

Despite his many knockbacks and guilt over the impact of his activities on his family, (‘I just keep reminding myself that it’s important and it will make the world a better place’, he says), Drew Hutton continued to advocate for legislative change across many conservationist issues.

His son Josh recalls being required to spend time at a nuclear protest with ‘a bunch of smelly hippy kids without any shoes on”. His second wife Libby describes losing a baby to stillbirth and Drew’s decision to ‘race off’ after the funeral because he had a speech to deliver.

But it wasn’t until the coal seam gas industry came to his attention in early 2010 that he found a topic he could truly make his own.

After stepping back from teaching and campaigning – but beginning to experience symptoms of what was to become a debilitating medical condition – his wife Libby mentioned coal seam gas. It was a light bulb moment. ‘At that point I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,’ he says.

Four years later the Lock the Gate movement is well known across the country and has drawn many of Drew Hutton’s former adversaries, the farmers, on board in a social change movement culminating in the Bentley blockade in northern New South Wales earlier this year.

And his old friend from school, Alan Jones, has added his influence to the cause.

8pm Monday on ABC.