Valerie Brown met the queen, was arrested – and led Greenpeace Australia

Valerie Brown Scribe Publications As a child watching people from the roof of her Brisbane home, Valerie A.

Brown, now in her nineties, noticed how “their actions did not match their stated ideals.” She dedicated her life to changing this, becoming one of Australia’s foremost change-makers.

In an era when most women could only dream of careers, she had numerous highly successful ones, changing Australia’s social and intellectual landscape quietly but profoundly.

The list of her roles is long (and exhausting!): TAFE teacher, consumer advocate, activist, public service department head, professor of environmental health, carer and writer.

And a wife and mother.

“I found I had acquired the skills needed … to keep multiple balls in the air,” she writes.

Review: The Girl on the Roof: the life of a change-maker – Valerie A.

Brown (Scribe) She started a children’s theatre group, promoted birth control against social conventions, worked to improve health systems in Nepal, and, despite feeling unqualified, headed Greenpeace Australia during the bombing of its Rainbow Warrior yacht in 1985 and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster .

“My experiences with Greenpeace read like a spy novel,” she writes.

As an initiation, she was taken into “a wild sea” off Sydney in a “rubber duck” speedboat.

Days later, activists planned to block outlet pipes from spewing chemical waste into Sydney Harbour, but “the waste backing up into the factory could have caused serious damage and even a threat to life”.

Her negotiations with the chemical company and the activists averted tragedy, but “left me being perceived by the Greenpeace activists as a wimp”.

Worse came soon after, at New Zealand’s Port of Auckland, when French army divers blew up the Rainbow Warrior with bombs fixed to its keel.

They wanted to stop it leading a protest flotilla against the French testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific.